As innovations change how retailers market and sell products today, traditional merchandising levers, like discounts, may not succeed in meeting your sales goals. Adding Affirm’s pay-over-time solution to your checkout flow can be a modern lever to help meet those objectives.

Several of our retail partners, including Tradesy, Alternative Airlines, and Super ATV, achieved better sales metrics after implementing Affirm. Highlights from their stories below demonstrate how Affirm can be a tool to reach—and possibly exceed—four common merchandising goals.

Goal: Increase new customer acquisition

Traditional lever: Launch targeted or scaled campaigns
Affirm solution: Promote our pay-over-time option early in the buyer’s journey

Your partnership with Affirm is a marketing tool that reframes how much a customer may be able to afford. Having the option to pay in monthly installments instead of a lump sum may be the factor that allows a new customer to buy.

Letting customers know about this option earlier in the sales journey—i.e., before checkout—can make the difference. Displaying the option to buy with Affirm on product display pages, in email campaigns, or on banner ads proved effective for several of our partners. Deploying Affirm’s as low as messaging on product display pages, for example, led to a threefold spike in sales volume for Super ATV and a 14% lift in conversion at Tradesy.

Goal: Meet quarterly sales targets

Traditional lever: Discounts
Affirm solution: Launch 0% APR promotion

What consumer doesn’t love a discount? For retailers, however, discounting can be a slippery slope that trains customers to regularly wait for a sale. It could also prove costly to your margins and even your brand integrity. 

Offering a 0% APR promotion with Affirm is a great way to capitalize on a customer’s intent to buy, as paying over time fits some budgets better. Alternative Airlines decided to run a 0% APR promotion during the holiday season, which resulted in a 12% increase in bookings driven by traffic from the Affirm app.

“The 0% APR is good because then customers don’t have to shop around on different sites to find the best price,” said Sophie Georgalakis, a marketing executive at Alternative Airlines. “We wanted people to be able to jump on the flight opportunities they saw. If they have the flexibility to pay off those purchases in three to six months with 0% APR, saving a few dollars doesn’t matter.” 

Goal: Increase average order value

Traditional lever: Encourage bundling
Affirm solution: Promote pay-over-time during key bundling periods, use Prequalification 

Back-to-school, wedding, and holiday seasons are just a few of the occasions when shoppers buy in higher volumes, and bundling different items that fit together with the occasion can increase the cart size of each shopper. These seasonal events can also be expensive, so promoting Affirm during these times can give buyers the flexibility to afford a higher total purchase that can be repaid in monthly installments (including terms beyond 12 months, where applicable).

Our personalized Prequalification feature takes away some of the affordability guesswork by letting customers know how much credit they’re eligible for before entering the checkout flow. By giving customers this information as they browse, many of our partners have seen lifts in AOV. For example, ProAudiostar saw a 33% increase in Affirm AOV after implementing Prequalification. 

Goal: Clear out overstocked inventory

Traditional lever: Discount/market key categories
Affirm solution: Increase approvals or layer multiple offers

In addition to offering our standard repayment timelines, we can work with you to create a few different options for buyers, including longer terms or increased credit approvals, that address your business’s specific needs. Ghostbed was one of the first of our partners to take advantage of our increased approvals program, which enables you to subsidize the increased risk when Affirm approves deeper credit levels. Ghostbed succeeded in reaching more customers, especially when layering a longer terms plan with a 0% APR promotion, discounting, and Prequalification. 

Instead of resorting to a discount to clear inventory, simply selecting a segment of inventory for a 0% APR financing offer, as Giant Bikes did, can drive volume. “We experienced a very nice bump in sales—so much so that we extended that 0% offer for an additional two weeks,” said Allen Needle, sales operations manager for Giant Bikes.

The tactics outlined above are just some of the ways our retail partners applied Affirm’s features to meet (and often exceed) merchandising goals. To learn more about these and other ways to work with Affirm, please contact your client success manager or our sales team, or email merchanthelp@affirm.com.