A Groupon case study • 2016
Redesign of Groupon’s
Merchant self-service platform,
Merchant Center
The goal
As Groupon evolved beyond just providing deals, Merchant Center did not appropriately keep pace. We needed to become less deal-centric and be more inclusive of the different ways Merchants worked with us.
As we outlined our desired improvements to the current Merchant Center experience, we wanted to solve some of the most common pain points of the current system:
The navigation and structure: Merchant Center originated around a single product—the deal—and it has been difficult to scale to include newer products.
The static dashboard: It takes up ample real estate without adding an equivalent level of value.
We were focused on increasing Merchant's engagement with Merchant Center because we had identified that to be one of the leading factors in the retention of Merchant's to the Groupon platform. Improving the attrition numbers of our merchant partners was another impactful area to the business. The goal for the Merchant Center redesign and accompanying engagement efforts were to increase the visit rates of active merchants to 2x/week from the current 2x/month number. This was an important metric as our research shows that engaged merchants who understand their ROI are more likely to continue their Groupon relationship.
Audience
Merchant Center is a globally used platform for Groupon merchants. The platform supports multiple products—campaign, delivery & takeout, and booking/reservations—for both North American and International merchants.
The redesign will also have an impact internally for Groupon. Therefore, our stakeholders included the Merchant Development team, which serves as a frontline resource for Merchants.
Constraints
Our priority for the first release was feature parity with the existing Merchant Center. Therefore, the redesign was implemented in segments.
Time and resources were two of the biggest challenges associated with the redesign. We were dependent on other product teams who fed us product-specific metrics.
Design process
The first step was to define navigation and site organization that better aligned with Groupon’s current business. The redesign began in November of 2015 when I completed a card sort activity with Merchant Center's internal product partners. The card sort helped explore and shape the system's architecture. I chose the card sort activity because it was a low fidelity way to get stakeholders involved. I also hoped that participation from multiple corners of the organization would result in more buy-in for the project as a whole.
Three possible architectures were defined by the card sort solutions.
After initial explorations with these three identified navigation structures we settled on option three which demonstrated the most drastic change. This allowed us to rethink every aspect of the Merchant experience rather than simply reorganize the existing content into new pages.
The new direction broke down previous silos created by the different product types. Shared content across product type now live together and are grouped around common tasks:
Performance metrics
Management activities
Customer interaction
Profile or account setup
Another fundamental change to the Merchant Center is the creation of a dynamic landing page that surfaces time-sensitive information to users. I wanted to move away from the static dashboard that looked the same regardless of merchant type or activity. The new landing page established rough rules for content but ultimately aimed to be flexible and dynamic.
The landing page needed to support a the entirety of the Merchant lifecycle. We identified nine distinct Merchant use cases to consider.
All Merchants would have a prominently positioned ‘Active’ section that would surface campaign, service, or product-specific metrics. Merchants would also see a Customers section that shows metrics related to the business’s customer engagement.
Time-sensitive actions were made front-and-center.
For instance, campaign prep tasks, messaging that a campaign is nearing its sales cap, or anything needing immediate action.
Results
Following the launch of the redesign we conducted a Merchant satisfaction survey. More than 45% of the merchants rated the new Merchant Center experience a 10 out of 10. And, about 70% of the merchants rated it an 8 and above.
In the words of some of the merchants…
"It's easy to use. I love being able to see how many potential clients are viewing our offers. I also like being able to see who has purchased a voucher vs. downloading the list. This is very effective and a perfect step in the right direction. Thank you Groupon for working so hard to create a new Merchant Center! This is perfect and the information included is vital to business owners."
"Very simple and organized. Easy to navigate. Love easy access to see how sales go daily, weekly. Love it."
"Way more information. I can see how many times people have seen my deal, how they saw it and where those who buy live. Finally!! Thank you."