CHECKOUT AS GUEST

Enabling online shoppers to purchase items from branded resale stores without an account


Brandback is an e-commerce startup that provides branded resale platforms for consumers to buy and sell used items more efficiently. Our first resale marketplace had a buyer conversion rate of 2.1%, below the industry standard of 3.6%, which directly impacted GMV, the company's key metric at the time. As the first product designer on the team, I was responsible for working with our CPO to identify and address the root cause by building the Checkout as Guest feature.Company: Brandback // Timeline: Jul- Aug 2024 (3 weeks)
Role: Product Designer // Collaborators: CPO, CTO, Contract Engineer
Tools: Figma // Skills: User Research, UI Design, Product Management




How can we increase buyer conversion rates from 2.1% to the industry standard for female fashion of 3.6%?

To identify the root cause of our low conversion rate, I looked at two main factors: 

01 Funnel performance to identify key drop-off moments

02 Targeted qualitative user surveys to identify pain points (embedded in the buyer journey & emailed to past buyers)


Embedded user survey to gather qualitative feedback about checkout process



Funnel performance analysis shows sign up screen as major drop-off point during checkout process
Results from user survey show dissatisfaction with necessity to create an account



Sign in/Create new account was a major drop off moment in the buyer journey

The funnel analysis clearly showed that signing in or creating a new account was the first major drop-off moment in the buyer's journey. This was confirmed by the results of our targeted qualitative user surveys, with 12% of users indicating that they were dissatisfied with their shopping experience due to the need to sign in or create an account. Of the several possible buyer journey improvements we had on our roadmap, including adding more payment options, simplifying the bidding process, and supporting more countries for shipping, we decided to focus on the Guest Checkout feature first. 



Previous checkout process requiring sign up or log in


Previous bidding process requiring sign up or log in


Optimizing for GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) instead of account number growth 

To accelerate development, Brandback's engineering team had built the marketplace platform using Sharetribe, a software solution designed specifically for marketplaces that came with many out-of-the-box features. Sharetribe's default checkout flow required users to register or log in before starting the checkout process. 

While the account feature allowed us to quickly grow our account numbers, it was a barrier for many users to purchase their first item. Since the low conversion rates directly impacted the platform's GMV, the company's key metric at the time, we decided to optimize for sales rather than account number growth.







Creating a custom flow to allow users to buy and submit offers as guests.

One of the challenges with this new feature was that we had just introduced another feature to the platform: Bidding on items. Therefore, I also had to consider a bidding process that could be completed by users without an account. This was a challenge not only for the user experience design, but also for our technical team. 



Preliminary version of the Checkout as Guest flow









Refining the position of the ‘Continue as Guest’ button 

Preliminary user testing showed that the "Continue as Guest" button often required users to scroll down the page to see it. To ensure that users would not miss this option, I decided to refine the layout of the page. Of the 4 options I suggested, we chose option 2 for two main reasons: 

01 As a new platform, 70% of buyers are first-time users. Therefore, prominently displaying the "Sign Up" instead of the "Sign In" form reflects the need for more users.

02 Highlighting the "Continue as Guest" button while keeping the "Login" button equally prominent should catch the attention of most users.


Final Design






Results & Next Steps

As the preliminary conversion analysis showed, the checkout conversion did not increase to 3.9% by adding the feature. However, we did see an increase of 0.8% and a conversion rate of around 2.9%. As the funnel analysis and user research showed, there were a few other drop-off points and features that users felt were missing. We had prioritized this feature after identifying it as 1) relatively easy to build & implement and 2) differentiating us from the competition in the resale marketplace space. 


After looking at these numbers, my team and I decided to tackle the following features next in order to reach our 3.6% conversion rate goal:

01 Adding additional payment options (PayPal in particular was requested several times by potential users)

02 Expanding shipping locations (users currently can only buy items from sellers in the same country)

03 Improving the bidding process (users reported long wait times for acceptance/rejection and difficulty keeping track of multiple bids) 




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JOHANNA SCHNEIDER
Johanna Schneider
schneider.johanna[at]outlook.com