Reducing order cancellation
Carousell, 2022
Carousell introduced an escrow service allowing buyers to make payments on the platform through 'Buyer Protection' to deal safely.
However, 1 out of 4 orders placed by buyers were cancelled. I led the discovery and design to improve the Buyer Protection experience for both buyers and sellers.
Role
Lead designer
User research | UI/UX design | Motion design | Design validation
Metrics
Reduced cancellation rate
Total transaction #
Platforms
App
Desktop Web
Mobile Web
Result
- 17%
order cancellation
3x
transaction growth
What leads to high cancellations?
As casual sellers remain a big part of Carousell’s community, converting these sellers to honoring in-app payment Buy Protection is the key to ensuring worry-free transactions for all parties. Through chat analysis and user interviews, I've learned that sellers are not open to offering Carousell Protection in the past for several reasons:
Lack of awareness
The enablement was coupled with delivery in the listing creation process resulting in sellers' lack of awareness of the seller responsibility.
Lack of policy enforcement
There was little oversight of seller conduct. Sellers had the freedom to cancel orders and conduct transactions off-platform without facing any consequences.
Why do I focus on sellers?
The dynamic between buyers and sellers inherently lacks equilibrium. Attempting to satisfy both parties with a singular policy is unfeasible. Without buyers, sellers cannot achieve success. Therefore, prioritizing a positive buyer experience is essential before further enhancing value for sellers.
By improving seller awareness about the expected behaviour and enforcing clearer policy plays an important role to ensure a good buyer experience.
How might we reduce seller cancellation rate?
Tackling cancellation at the top of the funnel is more effective than the bottom funnel as when order is about to be cancelled, the probability of a poor buyer experience is higher. I can sprinkle more educational touch point throughout the listing creation process but the existing sell form can no longer support the new use cases and features we are planning to grow Buyer Protection.
Listing creation experience was lengthy and overwhelming.
Before
Problems with the old listing journey (sell form)
Cluttered
Long form with lack of clear segmentation resulting in cognitive overload. Sellers lost patience and focus towards the end of the form.
Scalability issue
Not scalable for future use cases: fee communication, chat preference & etc
Lack of support
Limited real estate for education in a page that is already cluttered
Guidelines for listing creation experience
One step at a time
Reduce cognitive load by focusing on each section,
Stay focused
Keep the UI focused, reduce unnecessary distractions.
Efficient Error Handling
Handle intersection dependency error clearly for sellers to easily identify and rectify errors.
Scalability
Ensure the design and interaction are scalable to other categories, markets and listing types.
UX structure explorations
Single page with accordion
🟢 Better section focus
🟡 Shift of layout
🟢 Better task focus
🟢 Help users estimate the effort to finish the form via section overview
🟡 More taps to complete
Guided step multi-page form
🟢 Better task focus
🟢 Help users estimate the effort to finish the form via progress indicator
🟡 Difficulty to update previous fields in the middle of the form
I had discussions with the engineers to get early feedback for each approaches and planning for early release for learnings. We've collectively decided to go with Hub & spoke for MVP and keep linear steps as enhancement afterwards.
Making escrow enablement explicit
Seller needs to enable the service during listing creation explicitly instead of auto-enabled by platform.
I came up with several approaches to frame the enablement differently:
Enabling 'Buy' button: Allow sellers to picture the effect of this enablement on their listing is to add a 'Buy' button.
Payment preference: Anchor more towards how the buyer can pay for their listing.
After testing with users, option (1) is clearer to our users as opting into our escrow payment service with the right expectation of selling experience.
Before: Delivery and payment are coupled resulting in unclear enablement experience
Design versions tested in usability testing
Card enablement
Chips with collapsable education
Switch with education info
Policy enforcement
With the update of policy, we are now actively monitoring seller performance as a whole including order cancellation rate, ship out time, dispute rate and reviews. To ensure only sellers with good tracking record can enable 'Buy' button service as the first step of building a good buyer experience.
Sellers who constantly cancelled order will be restricted from listing with Buy button, and only allowed to deal via meet-up as meet-up is still a safer deal method for both buyers and sellers to minimize transaction risk.
Education
For sellers who are creating their very first listing with escrow, I've included education touch points only after their listing is created successfully to avoid disrupting user's goal to create listing
Post-listing education
Post-listing
For sellers who created their very first listing with escrow, I’ve worked with engineers to create an education component at the end of the listing journey.
Chatbot
To be resourceful, I made use of an existing chatbot capability as education tool to create an interactive Q&A bot. I worked with UX writer and a Backend engineer to craft the chatbot flow and content design as part of the onboarding education.
Post-listing education
Learnings
The sell form is a key feature of Carousell, as every seller must go through it to list items.
It required extensive persuasion of all stakeholders and meticulous planning, alongside vigilant post-launch monitoring to ensure key metrics remained healthy.
Utilising various validation methods was crucial in ensuring success of these updates.
