Improving online merchant store experiences
Overview
I worked with Paytm as a product designer between 2019 & 2020 on their native apps which have over 30 million active users. One of Paytm's main business vertical was merchant experience & live events, which I was a part of. The outcome was:
High adoption by brick & mortar store owners into online stores
30% increase in revenue for online stores
Over 15,000 daily active users for Paytm chat
My Contribution
Interface design
UX design
The Team
2 × Product designers
1 × Product manager
3 × Engineers
Year
2020
As quick commerce became extremely convenient to customers, they stopped going to the nearby brick and mortar stores and they suffered a noticeable revenue drop
While the traditional model of quick commerce worked on “dark stores”, Paytm identified this as an opportunity to convert brick & mortar stores into online shops
Shop owners were hesitant to use complicated software – but comfortable with chat applications.
Speaking with the store owners, we learned their biggest hurdle was using the complicated software for online store management. After studying their behaviour using their phones, we noticed how comfortable they were using chat applications like whatsapp & telegram.
The idea was to replicate the experience of using a chat application as an online store
Customers could directly talk to store owners (and even negotiate), make payments and place their orders.
What started as a feature to onboard shop owners, turned into a fully featured chat app
Customers could directly talk to store owners (and even negotiate), make payments and place their orders.
User onboarding was done through the payment success page
Since Paytm is a payments app first, a successful payment led the user to the new chat screen with the payee, and a successful payment meant the users were more likely to use the chat feature.
The chatroom helped us leverage more usecases – sports & live events
With the large userbase on Paytm, we als implemented live chatrooms for sports and events, this created a lively experience for the audiences who were watching sports from the comfort of their homes.
