A Groupon Case Study
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 were striving to improve on the current Merchant Center experience, we wanted to solve some of the most common pain points of our current system:
The navigation and structure: This was originally created around a single product—the deal—and has been difficult to scale to include newer products.
The static dashboard: It takes up amble real estate without adding an equivalent level of value.
Furthermore, we were focused on increasing Merchant's engagement with Merchant Center as 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 one of the biggest areas we could impact the business. The goal for the Merchant Center redesign and the 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 universally used platform for Groupon merchants. The platform crosses multiple products—campaign, delivery & takeout, and booking/reservations—for both North American and International users.
The redesign will also have an impact internally for Groupon. Therefore, our audience included the Merchant Development team who 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 one of the biggest challenges associated with the redesign. We were dependent on other product teams who fed us product-specific metrics.
Design process
Creating navigation and site organization that better aligned with Groupon’s current business was the first step. 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 completing some initial explorations around the 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 reorganizing the existing content into new pages.
The chosen direction allowed the content to not be silo-ed by product. Shared content across product type lives together and are grouped around common tasks:
Performance metrics
Management activities
Customer interaction
Profile or account setup
One of the biggest changes to Merchant Center is the creation of a dynamic landing page that surfaces only information valuable to users. The previous iteration of Merchant Center had a 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 variety of use cases that cover every point of the Merchant lifecycle. We identified nine distinct Merchant use cases to consider.
Homepage dashboard sections shared across Merchant types included Active that would surface campaign, service, or product specific metrics. Also consistent across the various merchants is the Customers section that shows metrics related to the business’s customer engagement.
Landing page space was reserved for time sensitive actions.
For instance, campaign prep tasks, messaging that a campaign is nearing its sales cap, or anything needing immediate action.
Results
At the time of the redesign’s launch we ran 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."