Groupon

Process

  • UX design

  • Prototyping

  • Visual design

Introducing Guest Checkout

Groupon customers who arrive signed out and land on a deal (product) page, experience friction after clicking the bright green “Buy” button. They are forced to either sign in or create an account. This interruption causes nearly half of the customers to abandon and end their purchase journey.

By introducing guest checkout to Groupon, customers can continue as a guest and we can eliminate this friction point by allowing new and existing customers to purchase on Groupon without having to sign in. This was one of the company’s biggest conversion initiatives of 2019.

Time frame

May 2019 - Nov 2019 (6 mo)

Platforms

Web (Desktop & Mobile)

Team

I led the design and collaborated with:

  • 2 Project Managers

  • 2 Engineers

  • 1 Content Strategist

Problem Statement

During the formative research, we learned 79% of web & mobile web customers arrive at Groupon.com signed out. Out of the customers who find a deal and click “Buy” on the deal page, nearly half (49%) abandon and do not make it to checkout. This results in ~2M potential orders that are left un-captured annually on mobile web alone.

Hypothesis

By allowing customers to “continue as guest”, we can reduce friction for those who show intent of purchasing a deal and drive an increase in annual web orders.

This will allow customers to proceed without having to create an account or remember their login credentials. Out of the 49% abandoners at sign in, 85% of those customers made some attempt to sign in or sign up but did not succeed and 15% did not make any attempt. This data suggests “continue as guest” may benefit both new and existing customers.

What does success look like?

  • Reducing abandonment at sign in

  • Positive impact on conversion

Design Process

Highlighting a few critical steps throughout the overall design process:

01 Formative Research

Data analysts provided key insight showing nearly half of logged out customers abandon at sign in — in turn abandoning a potential purchase. This made a case for a guest checkout.

03 Wireframe & User Flow

Nailing down the complete user flow was essential in visualizing all of the touch points for guest checkout as it was a massive undertaking. It helped me to plan out my design sprints and helped stakeholders visualize the flow.

02 Interview Stakeholders

To better understand the variety of inventory that guest checkout had to support, we interviewed stakeholders from different parts of the business. We were able to a better understand specific requirements for the inventory type and which touch points to support a “signed out” customer throughout their purchase and redemption flow.

04 Iterative Design

With such a large scale project, we went through many revisions. Iterations of the design and prototype were presented at the product, engineering and design review.

Challenges

Guest checkout is common in the e-commerce space; however, Groupon has a unique business model and resulted in unique challenges — to name a few:

  • Support 32+ inventory types in one guest experience

  • Support redemption flow — allow voucher access without sign in

  • Promote account creation for new customers

Supporting 32+ Inventory Types

Groupon has a wide range of inventory — goods, local, getaways, booking, 3rd party inventory, etc. Each one of these breakdown even further into specific types of deals with unique purchase and redemption flows. We conducted stakeholder interviews and inventory audit to ensure all variants of purchase and redemption flows were supported by guest checkout.

Redemption of Vouchers

Customers were required to log in to view any order information. However, with the introduction of guest checkout, a customer who buys a skydiving deal as a guest should be able to access the voucher to redeem their courageous excursion without having to sign in. During the stakeholder interviews, we collected all of the unique redemption flows for all the business verticals and inventory types. We used this to map out the various redemption flows.

Account Set Up Post-Purchase

Guest checkout allow customers to skip account creation; however, as a business, we still want to encourage customers to establish an account for a more personalized experience, allow for recommendations and ultimately build a connection with Groupon. We saw the receipt page and email confirmation as an opportunity to encourage an account set up.

Results

This feature launched as an A/B experiment on web and was successful globally. This was tested on web first because of the higher rate of signed out customers; however, we do plan to test this on mobile. We saw about a 6% increase in conversion in both North America and international markets. Based on the success of this test, guest checkout has been rolled out globally.

  • There was a 12% reduction in abandonment rate from login page

  • Majority of guest customers who complete their purchase do not utilize the “set password” feature we rolled out — where only 15% of guest checkout customers are signing into their account. There is an improvement opportunity here.