4 Checkout Automation Strategies To Beat Sluggish Sales

If you are not actively putting checkout automation to work in your creator business, then you are missing the boat. I’m Scott Moran the co-founder at SamCart, the commerce platform for creators, and checkout automation is what’s next in e-commerce.

Let’s talk about 4 ways that you can leverage the same technology that Amazon and Apple are dumping ungodly sums of money into to pull more profit out of your digital product sales. Everything in this article is pulled straight from a mini-book we created called The Checkout Automation Blueprint. If you like the 4 strategies we’ll give you now, head here to get a free copy of this book to get 18 more just like it.

Checkout Automation is a simple concept, but maybe not a term you’ve heard before. No, I’m not talking about those automated checkouts that can never tell when you put your freaking bananas into your bag or not. Checkout Automation is when you can boost revenue and profit by combining data and buyer behavior to present the right offer at the right time to the right person.

Think of how when you buy some diapers for your toddler on Amazon, and Amazon recommends adding some baby wipes to the order. That’s checkout automation in action.

Or how your favorite softwares give you a chance to upgrade to annual billing after you log in for the 5th time. That’s checkout automation. If you can intelligently present the right person, with the right offer, at the right time, you win big. Checkout Automation is already taking over e-commerce. Now let’s talk about 4 simple ways that you can get in on the action and pull more revenue from your digital product sales.

First, let’s talk about pre-applied coupons.
From the SamCart Database, we know that when a coupon is present in an order, conversions are 41% higher! When our creators pre-apply a coupon for a customer, we’ve seen conversions as much as double.

So for your first trick of checkout automation, give your new customers a special discount to buy something else after they buy. In SamCart, you can customize the order receipt for each individual product you sell.

So when someone buys your 6-week meal plan, you could edit the receipt to include a link to buy the companion workout plans. Include a pre-applied coupon that gives them 20% off for being a new customer, and you’ve just given the right person, the right offer, at the right time.

Next, let’s talk about The Late Inning Payment Plan.
Payment plans are super popular for digital products. Whether you’re selling a seat inside of your cohort training, an expensive service, or high-ticket course, it’s super common for digital creators to include multiple payment options.

So customers can pay in full, or break up that payment into smaller chunks by buying with a payment plan. Well, here’s a little checkout automation magic fairy dust to sprinkle over your payment plans to make more from them.

Do not offer your payment plan right off the bat. So if you have a webinar that visitors attend, the offer at the end of the webinar should not offer a payment plan. Or at least, not right away. Present your audience with one option, to pay in full. And then as you get closer to the deadline to buy, introduce your payment plan option.

Keeping the payment plan back until the “late innings” will make you more money, as more customers decide to pay in full. And then introducing the payment plan acts as another reason for your audience to reconsider what you’re selling. People get banner-blindness so quickly. Introducing a payment plan is the reason for people to come back and look again.

Bonus points if you introduce the payment plan the day before you close down your offer for good. The added conversion boost from the countdown timer ticking away will act as a conversion-boosting trampoline. But instead of falling and breaking your arm, you just get a ton of new paying customers.

To put this into practice, take your sales page and duplicate it inside of SamCart. On the newly duplicated product, add your payment plan as an option for your visitors. So now you’ll have one page with just pay in full, and a second page that also has a payment plan. For the first day or two, send visitors to the page with just pay in full. As your offer closes down, start sending people to the duplicated page where they can choose between paying in full or the payment plan.

The penultimate checkout automation strategy is called The Early Payoff.
Remember all those payment plans you sold in the last strategy? I bet you’ve sold hundreds by now. Well, when you do have payment plans, you are taking a big tradeoff. You’re saying it’s worth it to get more customers, in exchange for not collecting all the money up front.

Well what if you could have your cake and eat it too? Remember, checkout automation is all about putting the right offer, in front of the right person, at the right time. So the next time you have a bunch of customers on payment plans, send them this email.

30 days after someone buys, fire off an email to them that gives them a chance to save 20% by paying off the balance of their subscription early. Prompt them to simply reply “YES!” To the email, and then SamCart can take care of the rest.

As you get these YES replies, pull up that customer’s order and click on the Payoff button. Plug in whatever discount you want, and use the customers card on file to collect the rest of that cash.

Easy for you. Easier for the customer. And you're massively increasing your cash flow. Never worry about losing payment plan revenue to declined cards and failed payments. Use an early payoff to cash in now.

Ok last one. Checkout Automation strategy number four is called the Subscription Saver.

Those recurring payments we just talked about....they are all massively risky. Any creator that has subscriptions for a membership, payment plans for a course, or has client retainers for a service knows that collecting money on autopilot is the holy grail of digital commerce.

But, have you ever stopped to consider how declined payments, lost or stolen credit cards, or even just expired cards are effecting that recurring revenue? Here’s a crazy stat from the SamCart database, the average credit card successfully rebills 4.33x before problems kick in. Put another way, you can reasonably expect 5 months of recurring billing until declined charges start eating away at your sales.

Sow what does checkout automation have to say about this? The Subscription Saver is your automated robot butler that works around the clock to protect your recurring revenue from shrinking month after month after month.

When a customer’s card declines, SamCart springs into action and emails that customer with a unique link to update their card right from their inbox. Never one to rest on their laurels, Subscription Saver continues this process automatically, with 4 attempts over the course of 16 days.

One SamCart creator showed us that Subscription Saver had saved +$58,000 in revenue for them over the past 12 months. That’s checkout automation that pays for itself many many times over.

Combine that with Card Account Updater, which uses AI to make sure when your customer updates their card at their local gym, that SamCart automatically updates their card on file for your membership. And you can see how automating core functions like this are a slam dunk money maker for anyone with recurring sales.

Checkout Automation isn’t really the future. It’s here now, on every major site you use, in almost all of your favorite software you use every day. The real fight is bringing checkout automation to work for you and your business.

If you want 22 more checkout automation strategies that can make you more money, then make sure you grab the The Checkout Automation Blueprint.

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