Increase sales with flexible payments from Affirm
Offering Affirm's buy now, pay later payment option through Tekmetric and Stripe can increase ecommerce sales by boosting conversion rates, raising average order values, and attracting more customers—especially younger buyers—by allowing purchases to be split into smaller, manageable payments.
Payment methods aren’t simply about an exchange of money. They're personal. In the ecommerce environment, offering the right payment methods is like extending an invitation — it lets your customers know they're welcome and can expect a seamless experience.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) methods provide even more convenience and flexibility, allowing customers to break their purchases into smaller payments. When you add BNPL to your menu of payment options, you open the door to more customers and higher-value sales. In fact, a recent survey found that more than 70% of businesses using BNPL report higher conversions, average order value, and customer acquisitions.
Tekmetric has partnered with Stripe to make Affirm’s BNPL payment methods available to your customers. Businesses that offer BNPL through Stripe on average see a 24.5% increase in sales. Adding Affirm to your mix of payment methods can help your business:
1. Boost Conversion
A $400 price tag might discourage some customers from clicking buy, but when they can split that cost into four $100 payments, the transaction may be more appealing. That's how BNPL methods can help motivate your customers to make an order, driving up your conversion rate.
2. Increase Your Average Order Value
BNPL methods may encourage your customers to order more lower-value goods at one time, increasing your average cart size. It may also encourage them to purchase high-value goods, such as luxury items or furniture. In either case, your customers have greater ability to place higher-value orders, which can help drive revenue.
3. Reach More Customers
BNPL methods can help you tap into new market segments by making a purchase easier on a customer's budget through a series of smaller payments. These payment methods are especially attractive to younger customers who may not have a credit card or the ability to pay for large purchases in a single payment.
The flexibility of buy now, pay later is a huge benefit to your customers—one that can inspire them to make a purchase. And—maybe the best part—this all happens without extra work on your part, and Affirm takes on any potential risk.
With Affirm, you get paid in full immediately, while your customer owes only a portion or nothing up front. Affirm handles underwriting the customer and collecting payments, and assumes liability if a customer files a fraud-related dispute, so you can focus on growing your business.
Click here to learn more about how Tekmetric and Stripe can help you optimize your checkout.
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See how your shop stacks up against thousands of auto repair shops nationwide
You track your ARO. Maybe you watch your car count week over week. You know when a month is good and when it's below par.
But here's a question most shop owners can't answer quickly: Compared to shops like yours, are your numbers strong, average, or quietly underperforming?
There's a real difference between a number that's improving and a number that's competitive. A shop can grow ARO year over year and still be well below what high-performing shops are seeing in their market. Without an external reference point, you don't know which situation you're in.
That's the problem benchmarking solves, and it's the reason the data matters more than the direction.
Internal Tracking Tells You the Trend. Benchmarking Tells You the Truth.
Internal performance tracking is essential. If you don't know your ARO, car count, parts margin, and effective labor rate, you're managing without the most basic tools. But internal tracking has a structural limitation: it can only tell you how you're doing relative to your own history.
That's useful for spotting momentum — a rising ARO, a growing car count, tighter parts margin. What it can't tell you is whether your baseline is strong or weak relative to the market.
A shop with a $580 ARO that has grown from $520 over two years has made real progress. But if top-performing shops in their region are averaging significantly higher, that progress hasn't closed the competitive gap. It's just moved in the right direction.
The fix isn't to stop internal tracking. It's to add an external benchmark so you know what the target actually looks like.
The Problem With Benchmarking From Anecdotes
Many shop owners get their benchmarks the informal way: conversations with peers at trade shows, numbers shared in coaching groups, or revenue figures posted in forums. These have real value, but they're also limited.
Self-reported numbers skew high (people share their wins). Peer groups are small samples. Industry averages from trade associations are often lagged and lack the granularity you need to compare fairly — a six-bay shop in a suburban market shouldn't be benchmarking against national averages that include dealership-adjacent shops in metro areas.
The more useful comparison is data drawn from shops operating in similar conditions, at similar scale, tracked in a consistent and anonymized way.
What Good Benchmarking Actually Looks Like
Effective benchmarking for an auto repair shop compares you on the four metrics that most directly drive profitability:
- ARO: Are you getting full value from each car that comes through your door?
- Car count: Is your volume where it needs to be to support your revenue goals?
- Parts margin: Are you protecting margin as supplier costs fluctuate?
- Effective labor rate: Is your real revenue per labor hour aligned with your posted rate?
Each of these metrics has a different lever. If your ARO is lagging, the fix usually involves inspection completion rates or customer communication. If your car count is stagnant, the issue is typically acquisition or retention. If your parts margin is eroding, your pricing matrix needs a look. If your effective labor rate is low, it's often a discounting or packaging problem.
Benchmarking tells you which problem to solve first. That's valuable when you have limited time and you're trying to prioritize.
How the Tekmetric Shop Index Works
The Tekmetric Shop Index is a free benchmarking tool built from data collected across more than 12,000 auto repair shops. Enter your shop's metrics and get an instant comparison showing where you stand on each of the four key measures. No Tekmetric account is required. Anyone can use it.
The output isn't a vague grade — it shows you where each metric ranks and gives you a clear picture of where the gap is largest. That's the signal that tells you where to focus first.
What to Do After You See Your Rankings
The benchmarking data is the starting point, not the finish line. Once you know which metric is your biggest gap, you can start asking the right questions:
- If ARO is lagging: How consistently are your technicians completing and sending digital vehicle inspections (DVIs)? Are customers seeing and approving the recommended work?
- If car count is flat: Are you actively pursuing new customers? Are return visit intervals optimized? Are declined jobs being followed up?
- If parts margin is soft: When did you last review your parts pricing matrix? Is it adjusting for recent cost increases from your vendors?
- If the effective labor rate is low: Are service writers building jobs accurately? Are discounts being applied consistently or inconsistently?
Each of these questions points toward a workflow, and Tekmetric's reporting is built to surface the answers at the job, technician, and service writer level. But even before you get to that step, knowing which question to ask is most of the work.
The Shops Getting This Right
High-performing shops don't treat benchmarking as a one-time exercise. They check their rankings periodically, track how their numbers shift against the industry baseline, and use the comparison to coach their teams with context.
"You're at 85% DVI completion" is a data point. "You're at 85% completion, and top shops are at 95%" is a coaching conversation with direction.
"Seeing them take the shift to Tekmetric and then grow profitability in the same four walls has been phenomenal. Some of them are just exponential." — Matt Schwab, Clutch Automotive, Tekmetric Customer
Takeaways
- Internal tracking shows you direction; benchmarking shows you position.
- The four metrics — ARO, car count, parts margin, effective labor rate — are the right comparison points.
- Good benchmarking data is consistent, anonymized, and drawn from shops with similar operating profiles.
- The TSI tool is free, built from more than 12,000 shops, and gives you an instant read on where your gaps are largest.
- Your benchmark result tells you which lever to pull first — and that's where the work starts.
Once you know your gaps, the next step is building a system to close them.