We ALL want to buy the cheapest stuff, right?
Cheapest holidays, cheapest appliances, cheapest clothes … cheapest food … cheapest jewellery, er, well … … hmmm …. no. There’s a reason we don’t shop at Primark, drive a Dacia and fly with Ryanair all the time.
So maybe we don’t ALWAYS want cheap. But it definitely gets attention.
We speak to a lot of merchants who have been lured by the promise of cheap rates and discount pricing when it comes to retail finance. Which is great – if lower costs are your number one priority. And if that is the case, we wish you well and recommend you go with one of these other low-cost providers.
But if your priority is revenue and profitability then there are some other rates you need to be thinking about:
Conversion rates
How many people who start the finance journey actually get to the end and make the purchase and how many drop out along the way? Not a metric all merchants measure, but it’s just as important in the retail finance application as it is elsewhere in your customer journey.
DID YOU KNOW
Last year we increased conversion by 20% with just one change to our application form. Just one! And our continuous improvement programme means we’re always running A/B testing and increasing conversion.
Acceptance rates
This is a metric many of you will be tracking. How many of your customers get accepted for finance is an important consideration. Are you deploying every tactic available to responsibly and ethically provide finance to as many customers as possible? Using multiple lenders with different credit policies and different risk appetites increases your customer’s chance of being accepted. Combined with smart tech that finds the right lender and right loan automatically this is an instant acceptance rate boost.
DID YOU KNOW
Deko AcceptPlus typically results in 1 in 4 previously declined applications being accepted and 88% of people offered an alternative finance deal take it. For larger merchants a credit card solution can also minimise declines by offering an alternative line of credit.
Refer rates
How good is your customer experience? High refer rates mean customers apply for finance but are kept waiting for a decision while their application is manually reviewed. Not just annoying for the customer but bad for sales as this break in the purchase process increases the likelihood that the customer will go elsewhere or just won’t complete the sale.
DID YOU KNOW
Our lenders have referral rates as low as 1%. No ambiguity for customers and more sales completed instantly for merchants.
There are 2 levers to controlling business profitability – cost and revenue.
Lowering costs as far as they can go doesn’t always lead to strong growth. The three metrics above that we focus on relentlessly all directly correlate to increased sales.
Most other retail finance providers are lenders themselves. This means they focus mainly on accept rate, which is the bit they control with their credit policy. Because we’re a technology company, we can also focus on conversion optimisation, increasing accept rates through enabling multi-lender applications, making the process easier for customers and improving the overall experience. And we have a panel of leading lenders with their own great acceptance rates.
Don’t just take my word for it though. We were able to analyse the data for one cycle retailer who’s joined us recently and discovered AcceptPlus would have increased their revenue by £480,000 if they’d moved to us sooner. We recently calculated another retailer would have made an extra £650,000.
We’re not the cheapest, and we’re fine with that. It’s because we’re different. It’s because the actual impact we have on a merchants revenue is far greater. Working with a provider who measures, improves and focuses on these growth metrics means you’re in the best hands. Our merchants understand this and know that our smart technology is a great competitive differentiator for them too.
So yes, maybe you’re saving a few basis points on the subsidies compared to other providers that promise the lowest retail finance rates, but make sure it’s the right rates you’re thinking of. Cheap subsidies for solutions that have cumbersome online journeys, non-mobile optimised application forms, or single lender solutions are a false economy.
Because it’s value for money we’re all after not rock-bottom prices.
