Dylan Ginoza

Putting the "cart" in SamCart

To reduce vertical space on mobile and make the checkout seem "shorter," I put many features behind dropdown elements, such as the order summary in an expandable panel that resembled Stripe's mobile "cart" feature. However, this was controversial because our sellers focus on single product orders with options to add products through upsells and cross-sells.

A/B test with internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

I ran an initial A/B study with team members our sales and support team to get their feedback as they represented aggregated perspectives based on their knowledge of user behaviors and pain points. These sessions had the secondary effect of building trust and generated excitement for the Product team's work.

"Wait, what am I buying?"

Because customers would likely be dropped into Express Checkout from ads or other sales pages, it was crucial to confirm the product being purchased with the customer. For that reason, the cart was dropped in favor of a clear order summary featuring the product.

A/B test with sellers

Many of our sellers cater to demographics that are not "digital natives" and therefore require more context on the web and attention to solid accessibility practices. In an era where I see text sizes getting smaller and niche iconography replacing accurate descriptors, their feedback was a great reminder to design for all and not rely on trendy patterns.

Finding the Goldilocks page length

Simply displaying all of our features with clear labeling was not going to work, especially with speed to transaction being a top priority for sellers. This was especially challenging as I was incorporating subscription pricing. To preserve the clarity of subscription terms, all of my designs incorporated these cases to ensure that subscription products would be as neat and understandable as one-time payment products.

A/B test with end customers

I ran an unmoderated study with participants who recently purchased digital products online. Showing variations in an A/B test helped tease out actionable feedback and identify friction points, though these types of studies are imperfect at recreating the conditions and mindset of checking out. At best, all participants understood the purpose of the page, what was available to them, and how to complete a purchase.

Adapting the page for an embeddable experience

Our next offering was an embeddable version of the checkout, called Embed checkout. Sellers often come to SamCart with an established online presence, and we wanted to provide sellers the ability to take our checkout form and all of our lucrative features and plop it directly on their existing pages. However, it wasn't as easy as copying Express Checkout and pasting it onto a page.

A/B test with sellers

The challenge of putting all of our features on an embeddable i-frame led me to design a new experience completely separate from the existing Express designs. I put a number of different layouts in front of sellers for feedback — 1-column, 2-column, multi-step, etc. Sellers surprisingly were open to multi-step layouts as they directed customer attention much more handily than a 2-column layout with everything visible. Those seemed overwhelming and disorganized to them to embed on their content-heavy pages.

Revising both experiences for launch

With insights gained from evaluating both experiences, I updated the designs for both and converged on a more unifying look and feel.

Launch!