Guest can’t checkout items without creating an account

This is what the guest purchasing experience looks like. Once a guest clicks on Buy Now or enters the cart to checkout, what they see next is the New account or Login screen. These users have just tapped one of the most important CTAs in the entire application. By asking users to create a new account or login, we immediately present a massive amount of friction.

Our objectives and goals

Our objective is to make checkout experience available and smooth for guests. From past research done by our researcher, I learned that guest users prioritize checkout speed and value trust and security. Through the design that I implemented, I was able to streamline checkout process and increase users trust.

These were the goals we wanted to achieve:

• Decrease exit rate by 10%

• Improved order conversion rate by 20%

Design strategy

Here’s how I exceeded project goals within a month. I broke down the project into two phases

1. Phase one: focused on removing the login barrier and reduce exit rate and run A/B/C testing

2. Phase two: focused on optimizing checkout experience.

Solution is simple: remove the login barrier

But simply removing login creates an issue: Mercari requires an email address to process an order. So we need to find a way to capture user’s email address.

Another lost opportunity for us to remove login is to lose our potential user to convert to Mercari user. We’re losing out on opportunity to show them the benefits that come along with having an account. Therefore, once the user completes the purchase, it’s crucial we provide them the option to create an account.

We only have two weeks to design, here is the game plan:

1) Competitive analysis

I spent an extensive time looking into how other e-commerce sites designed their guest checkout. This helps me to understand industry standards.

2) Determine most viable approaches and run testing

Partnering with a senior designer, we utilized various levers observed from competitive review and came up with three different approaches we can test against the control group. This will help us understand which flow performs the best.

Setting up the test

Working with a PM and BI, we set up the testing environment. We released to all anonymous users in 25/25/25/25 split, and ran the test for 2 weeks.

These are the metrics we wanted to measure: Cart exit rate, user registration rate, and order conversion rate.

A/B/C test result and metrics tradeoff

We ran the test for 2 weeks, and here’s the result:
Variant 1: lowest cart exit rate, highest order conversion rate
Variant 2: highest user registration rate

The question we then becomes 'Immediate purchases or long term customer value?’

I set up a discussion with the Business partner. If we want to optimize short-term order conversion rate, then we go for V1. But if the business strategy is to value Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) then we move forward with V2.

Prioritize long-term customer value

Eventually, Variant 2 was chosen because it not only convert a higher number of users into one-time purchasers but also foster a relationship that encourages repeated purchases and loyalty. And this, leads to a higher CLTV.

This approach aligns with Mercari, especially our long-term goal is focus on loyalty and retention.