About the project
I worked in the International BU of Ant Group (Alipay), which provides payment solutions for its affiliated Alibaba cross-boarder business, 2 of which I participated in are:
- Lazada: top e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, operates in 6 countries in the region including Philippines, Maylasia, Thailand
- AliExpress: cross-boarder e-commerce platform in more than 100 countries, with major market share in Brazil, Spain and Russia
In the project, I set my feet in all local markets, utilizing localized user insights and platform data to drive new and existing payment enablement.
Background and goals
Outside the credit card dominated world, 17% people worldwide and 67% in Southeast Asia are unbanked. With e-commerce bringing products to them, the last connection before logistics is payment. With vastly varied local financial environment and payment methods, Ant Group aims to connect local users with their prefered payment experience. These payment methods include:
- Cash on delivery
- Store payment
- Bank debit
- Online banking
- E-wallet
- Voucher payment
- and more
Challenges and approaches
The team knew very little about local users' behaviour and payment habits. With existing payment methods suffering from low success rate, data itself cannot tell all the reasons for improvement. On the other hand, regulations, cultures, educations and most importantly the stickiness to cash result in a lack of trust for new and digital virtual payment. While these digital payments like e-wallet could benefit both users and the company by uplifting success rate and providing smooth experience, how to enable them remains a huge question mark.
For each market and each payment method that I was involved, me and my team started by understanding more about the country and users. We did the following things to conquer payment barriers in a localized way:
- E2E conversion rate break down and analysis for transaction
- Regional demographic and ethnographic research and built country specifc profile
- Recruited users and conduct field research & in-depth user interview locally
- Design sprint w/ users and internal stakeholders for journeys, pains and solutions
- Developed connection w/ local customer service team and had them as "sponsor users"
- User validation with prototypes locally
Deliverables and results
The core design principles are based in the essense of payment, which is the TRUST from users. The team worked hard to locate key LOCAL TRUST element in user experience and leveraged it to connect users.
With that, I designed for more than 20 methods in more than 5 countries. In Philippines, I helped upgrade Cash on delivery method in Lazada to ewallet option and increase its transaction by 5.01%. In Brazil, I optimized experience of Boleto method and increase its success rate by 4.01%.
