How does that impact buyers and sellers?

For buyers, they can only see balance at checkout. We are missing opportunity to upsell, decreasing pricing transparency, and reducing motivation to purchase.

For sellers, the only touchpoint is on the sell page. Without further guiding sellers to use their balance, sellers often withdraw balance to their bank account.

How balance works and why it’s important for the ecosystem

Mercari works like this: when a user made a sell on Mercari, the earnings becomes their ‘balance’ on the platform. The user can then use that balance to purchase more items… or transfer out to their bank.

From a business perspective, here are some benefits to keep balance within Mercari:

1. Increase user engagement

   • Keeping balance within the ecosystem encourages users to use the platform more frequently.

   • User can apply balance to purchase more items, or increase their sells to accumulate more balance.

2. Reduce transaction fees

   • Mercari absorbs the transaction fee when user withdraws. Increase balance = better financial shape for Mercari

Identify areas to surface balance, with buy intention in mind

From the very beginning working on this project, I was aware that when users withdraw balance from Mercari to their bank account, Mercari absorbs the transaction fee. If we highlighted balance where users have a weaker buy intent, it might trigger more balance transfers = more money lost on Mercari. Because of that, finding the right balance to surface information became the crucial first step (pun intended).

To better identify potential surfacing areas, I mapped out a flow that focuses on buy intention.

Explorations

After mapping out the flow, I started exploring some initial concepts to further present balance. With back and forth feedback from designers and PM, I’ve decided to focus on the item detail page touchpoint because the timing is most appropriate to make informed purchasing decision.

I further explored the banner design and came up with two variants. A static component that directly lists out final price a user would pay using balance (and coupon if applicable), an expandable component that provides breakdown of discount items used upon clicking.

A/B test result

With the two designs, we quickly launched an A/B testing to all users with balance to better understand how they like the information to be presented. 50% of users carrying balance will see V1, and the rest will see V2. Partnered with a business analyst, PM and I closely monitored the data for one week. The result: expandable component (V2) yielded higher balance usage rate by 12%.

The data suggested having the breakdown of balance and subtotal was especially useful, urging users to use their balance more.

Design for importance

And we hide the rest.
Expandable component enables sharing only necessary information upfront. While clicking, users can still access the breakdown of their discounts.

Design for clear pricing

Previously, the price information on the item detail page was messy, contributing to heavy cognitive load. Part of the project effort was to improve the information architecture. Here are the major revamp of the pricing section:

• Consolidated similar content and removed the noise

• Aligned visual and content between app and web

Design for transparency

When it comes to pricing, users care about transparency just as much as the final price. When the component is open, it shows all the breakdown for users. On Mercari, there are several price reduction mechanisms: balance, coupon, and credits. By being transparent of what method is taken into calculation, it helps user set better pricing expectation and feel more confident of their purchasing decision.

Scenario mapping for developers

Partnering with a content designer, we mapped out copy variants for different scenarios. This was especially helpful for engineers to work on surfacing balance copy and logic.