How The RTA Store Uses POS Lending to Lift Sales and AOV

As a leader in the “ready to assemble” cabinetry industry, The RTA Store has withstood the test of time by creating strong customer loyalty. The products that The RTA Store sells typically aren’t impulse purchases. Rather, buying cabinetry is often viewed as an expensive and time-consuming part of creating and maintaining a household. Customers, who often come to The RTA Store after receiving expensive quotes from big-box stores, are looking for a cost-effective way to remodel. When The RTA Store decided it wanted to offer financing, it searched for a partner it could trust as much as its customers have come to trust the brand.

The RTA Store chose to partner with Bread, a platform for pay-over-time solutions that allows shoppers to finance their purchases in low monthly installments. The white-label capabilities and the opportunity to offer Bread anywhere on its site — not just at checkout — allowed The RTA Store to quickly and seamlessly integrate the finance offering into its entire purchase funnel.

Using Financing to Acquire New Customers

The RTA Store knew if it could find a way to make cabinet purchases feel less daunting, it could increase sales significantly. By partnering with Bread, The RTA Store was able to offer and extend credit to a broader range of customers — both traditionally at checkout as well as at various customer touchpoints — without making any sacrifices to its products or services.

"Typically, customers are only offered financing when they're ready to check out," says Tyler Ackerman, The RTA Store's CEO. "With Bread, we were able to offer financing much earlier in the sales process. Our products are critical for the home, and the ability to pre-qualify our customers for financing so they knew what their monthly payment would be made them feel empowered. This has been instrumental in helping us acquire more customers."

The RTA Store team took a holistic approach to marketing the financing offering across several channels, including online and email. By partnering with Bread, The RTA Store provided its customers with access to financing packages typically reserved for big-box retailers. As a result, The RTA Store increased sales in a way that aligned with its overall mission.

“Since offering Bread financing, we’ve seen impressive growth in our key performance metrics every quarter, including sales, but also in average order value and transaction amounts," Ackerman notes. "Not only are we acquiring more customers, but they're purchasing more than ever before.”

Since implementing Bread, The RTA Store has seen the following results:

• 8.5 percent incremental increase in year-over-year sales;
• 130 percent higher average order value (AOV) for customers who used Bread financing compared to customers who did not use financing; and
• 3.7 percent of total customers were "won back" after being offered Bread financing.

Financing to Win Back Abandoned Shoppers

After several months of encouraging traction across sales and revenue using Bread, The RTA Store wanted to test whether Bread could also help with people who created a cart online but never completed their purchase. The retailer's marketing team conducted a simple A/B email campaign to test the impact of offering financing in cart abandonment emails. One email used standard language and messaging, while the other offered financing options through Bread.

“The results of the A/B test were remarkable, and we’ve been able to use Bread financing not only to attract new customers, but also to win back customers who have abandoned their carts,” says Ackerman. “We were able to harness actionable insights gathered from Bread to drive more sales and retarget shoppers who applied for financing but left without making a purchase.”

Emails that included a personalized financing offers saw a three X improvement in email conversion rates and drove a 155 percent increase in revenue. In addition, emails that included the personalized financing checkout links saw a 38 percent lift in clickthrough rate and 86 percent higher AOV.

Louise Ng is the director of marketing at Bread, a full-funnel, white-label financing solution for merchants.