Many small businesses resorted to using Razorpay’s Payment pages as their Makeshift Storefronts. They were very reluctant to invest in mature storefront solutions (like Shopify) due to complexity & cost.
We built Storefront pages, a new flavor of Payment pages - providing a much easier way for these emerging businesses to showcase their products
Background
What is Razorpay?
Razorpay is a fin-tech company that enables businesses of all sizes to manage payments with its large product suite
What are Payment Pages?
Small & medium sized businesses use Razorpay Payment pages an intuitive custom-page-builder to quickly start accepting payments for their products or services, donations, events etc
The product premise is simple: As a business owner, click a button > Preview your payment page & edit a few key details on the fly > Share with customers.
Payment pages provide a WYSWYG builder to users to give the illusion of speed
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It started with a discovery...
What was my role?
Duration
4 months (Oct 22 to Jan 23)
Role
Product design lead (solo)
Overview
Led research and design in close collaboration with the PM (Gautham Varma). Frequently consulted designers & researcher from our parent Payments group for critique and ideas.
Presented findings at each stage to gain product and design leadership buy-in. Amidst many hurdles, we proudly launched this around the time of my departure from Razorpay in Mar 2023.
✢ RESEARCH ✢
Why solve this problem?
If a business owner wants to set up a storefront, what’s the first thing that’s likely to come to their mind?
Let’s use shopify, dukaan, wix stores, woocommerce or any of the other options. We also thought so.. But, on the other hand, we had 1000s of makeshift stores that these owners had already created. Why?
There was also a substantial business opportunity:
Ecommerce businesses were a tiny segment (15%) of the Payment page user base but they contributed significantly to our payment volume (35%).
The issue was that nearly half (44%) of these businesses stopped using Payment pages within 3 months. But why? Solving these problems could translate into significant business impact.
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Understanding the Problem space
What can we learn from already created Makeshift stores?
We did not know much about these businesses yet or what their problems were.. (we only had many assumptions)
...observing the products they sold, prowling their social media, chatting with some of them, understanding their sales trends and checking frantically if they had a storefront elsewhere.
This helped us develop a much deeper sense of the context. Initially, I spent 1-2 days skimming through a few pages but the study proved so valuable that I continued the analysis full-time during the following week.
eg: Greentactics sold bioenzyme products. Their customers typically discover their page via Insta bio.
(this is a representation of the nature of problems and are not the only or top problems)
There's no easy way to select a particular variant of a product. In this case, the buyer needs to type in the variant name in the textbox.
(this is a representation of the nature of problems and are not the only or top problems)
But, how do their customers browse or search their complete catalog?
How do they place a single order if they are buying multiple items?
(this is a representation of the nature of problems and are not the only or top problems)
Despite having a store, these businesses were struggling with experiential problems.. We documented all our hypotheses and potential user pain-points…
Slides from the secondary study report that I presented to stakeholders
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User interviews
Talking to owners of these small businesses
Sheet that we used to manage our interview calls
To cover a diverse set of businesses, we used signals such as: their industry, their sales volume, are they active or have they churned, the no. of pages they had created.
I made a detailed script with a list of starting questions - mostly thinking of these as prompts for the interview and relying on pointed follow-up questions to dig deeper.
The PM and I made many cold calls. We ended up having conversations with 30 business owners.
Transcripts and notes from interviews
We made many discoveries. The most important realisation was that...
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Insights
there were 3 distinct user segments..
We discovered that these businesses fell on a spectrum. Depending on the maturity of the business, their needs evolved and this affected how they leveraged Payment pages.
1
2
3
4
there was an Opportunity...
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Reframing the Problem
Most small businesses look for simpler storefront solutions during their initial years, until they scale to a point when a mature platform becomes necessary..
How might we help small/medium sized ecommerce businesses to easily showcase and sell their products on Payment pages?
✢ SOLUTION ✢
Buyer experience
Let’s see how Greentactics' storefront would look like.
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Product listing
With the new storefront page, they can showcase products with bigger images, organize by categories and have a brand identity
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Product details
They can also share links to a specific product's details with customers.
We plan to provide cross-sell opportunities and support for add-ons and variants, on this page.
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Cart & Checkout
Once the buyer proceeds to purchase, we decided to let another Razorpay’s product to take over the journey:
Creating a store
Let’s see how business owners can create their storefronts
On the Razorpay dashboard, they can head over to Payment pages section and click “Create”.
In the selection menu, the 1st option opens the existing generic page editor and the 2nd option opens the new storefront page editor
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Store creation view
Business owners can add their products, customize their store while looking at a live preview and do much more, all in one place.
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Cart & Checkout
Once the buyer proceeds to purchase, we decided to let another Razorpay’s product to take over the journey:
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Cart & Checkout
Once the buyer proceeds to purchase, we decided to let another Razorpay’s product to take over the journey:
