Improving the online payment experience

Providing customers with a seamless online payment experience.

Company

Pomelo
Launched Aug 2022

Role

Product Design
Product Management

Platform

Responsive web

Overview

Pomelo offers businesses the ability to accept over 25 payment methods, including digital wallets, cryptocurrencies, and bank transfers from major credit cards like MasterCard to localized payment methods like iDEAL, giving customers a wide range of payment options.

Project background

To increase Pomelo's growth, the company began to partner with financial institutions and offer them a whitelabeled version of our product. The partnership with Bank of Maldives was especially successful, as our payment methods were widely used by merchants in the Maldives to offer their customers the ability to pay in local currencies and avoid large international transaction fees.

Problem statement

While many customers are using our online payment experience to pay luxury hotels in the Maldives, the majority of payments generated by hotel staff that are not being completed by the customers.

Product vision

To increase the number of completed payments on our online payment experience.

Responsibility & process

To move from understanding to conceptualising on this project, I attended meetings with new and existing merchants to create prototypes that attracted new merchants and validated user experience.

Existing solution

Before designing, I wanted to ensure I had a full understanding the current payment process, involving two ways of capturing payments:

1. Customer scans a QR code: a merchant generates a QR code, the customer scans it, and completes the purchase on their browser.

2. Customer clicks a payment link: a merchant generates a payment link, shares it with the customer, and the customer completes the payment on their browser.

Research

I gathered requirements through interviews with luxury resort merchants using the platform for international payments, feedback from customer success managers at partner banks with insights from clients and sales teams, and by observing pitches to potential clients to understand their needs and how the platform could support their workflow.

1. Interviews with merchants

These merchants were luxury resorts using the platform to offer international payment methods to their guests.

2. Gathering feedback from customer success managers

All of our partner banks assign customer success managers to the merchant using the platform, meaning they have a range of input based on existing clients and feedback from their sales team.

3. Speaking to potential merchants

I also had the opportunity to sit in on pitches to potential new clients to understand their new requirements and how the system would fit into their workflow.

Findings

Encourage multi-currency payments

Encourage customers to use their local currency for payments while being transparent about the savings they can get by doing so.

Showcase merchant brand

Enable merchants to display their brand on the payment page for customers to identify who they are paying and build trust.

Dynamic payment experience

Develop a payment experience that adjusts to the merchant's payment method, styling, and terms and conditions consent.

Opportunity

I identified the following goals based on the requirements gathering and understanding of the payment process.

How might be encourage customers to complete payments in their local currency?

How might we showcase a merchants brand to build trust with customers completing a payment?

How might we ensure the payment expereince can adapt to a merchants configurations?

The final designs

After a successful testing with existing and potential merchants, this was the designs that we built and launched to customer in the Maldives, Sri Lanka and UK.

1. Focusing on merchants brands
Giving merchants the ability to really make their payment experience reflect their brand with customisable background images.

2. Reinforcing key merchant information
Ensuring the customer knows exactly who they are paying by highlighting merchant name and logo.

3. Highlighting multi-currency
Encouraging customer to complete the payment in their local currency.

4. Dynamic list of payment methods
Accounting for a range of different payment options based on the methods the merchant has enabled.

5. Highlighting partners brand
As Pomelo partnered with banks to roll out the product in different countries also highlighting the partner brand to build additional trust by showcasing a familiar brand to the customer.

Outcome

After successfully releasing the updated experience, we met the needs of our merchants, and within a year, we increased our daily processing volume from under £750,000 to an average of £4,000,000 per day.

New requirements

Show itemised basket

We implemented the ability for merchants to create an online shop which leads into the payment experience once they've created a basket, so the experience now needs to highlight the customers basket.

Capture customer information

Our previous experience focused on a merchant entering the customers information but we now wanted to allow customers to enter their own information on checkout.

Support a long list of payment methods

Merchants such as resort would have a list of 20 payment methods so we wanted to ensure the designs do not feel cluttered when all these methods are enabled.

Cater for curious customers

We found that lots of customer would click into unknown payment methods out of curiousity so we wanted to avoid having those customer venture too far into unknown payment methods.

Collect additional order information

Merchants now have the ability to enter a range of customer and order information before sending the payment to the customer so this information needed to be highlighted to the customer on checkout.

Cater for paying invoices

Invoicing is a global invoicing platform built to save merchant time and get you paid faster. Create and send invoices in minutes.

Reflection

Improving the payment experience on Pomelo involved developing new ways to collect payments and addressing the following concerns:

Capturing customer information
Merchants required various details such as billing address, shipping address, and table number for completing a sale.

Discounts
Merchants needed to offer discount codes for customers to input and receive discounted prices.

Cater for curious customers
To prevent customers from venturing into unknown payment methods, we made improvements to the payment method selection.

Before I left Pomelo, I worked on improvements to cater for capturing customer information, discounts and dealing with curious customers on the payment method selection.

More work