italki Checkout Page

Project | Flow

My team and I rebuilt the checkout page on our global website, focusing on providing a smooth, consistent purchase experience for new italki users.

The resulting checkout page increased 7-Day Conversions and Average Purchase amount substantially, generating tangible value for the business.

Quick Stats:

  • Registration - Conversion (7d): >150% increase. (Generated est. $71,383/month).
  • 60 Day Average Purchase Sum: 4.3% increase. (Generated $53,261/month).
  • Saved Payment Method Adoption: 60%.
  • Average Purchases/User: 6.5% increase.

Objective

italki began a website redesign in early 2017 and my team and I were responsible for rebuilding the checkout page with the primary goal of creating a simple and consistent purchase experience for new italki users.

Problem space

After consulting with stakeholders and revisiting interviews + data we uncovered a large list of customer, business, and technology problems that might be addressed in the new page to drive the desired objectives.

  • Non-zero % of payments not processing successfully + left incomplete (Business + User)
  • Customers not understanding italki Credits (Business + User)
  • Not enough repeat purchases (Business)
  • Low coupon use (Business + User)
  • Page reusability extensibility (Business + Technology)
  • Low clarity on payment status within our payment system (Business + Technology)
  • Payment fraud (Business)


Solutions

We had a primary hypothesis that by removing barriers to conversion (first purchase), we could generate the largest value for new users, and for the company, so we prioritized this problem in the redesign through Direct Purchases.

We also focused on secondary solutions of Encouraging Repeat Purchases, Extensibility + Modularity, and Increasing Coupon Visibility

Supporting direct purchases:

[UX + Business]

italki had previously built an economy built on a currency called “italki Credits”, and user research such as surveys + behavior mapping showed us that discovering this concept created needless friction when new users were considering whether or not to book a class. We therefore designed the payment page with direct product purchases in mind.

The hypothesis was that this would increase conversion of new users substantially (estimated 10%).

The result was an increase in 7 day conversion of roughly 300%.

Encouraging Repeat Purchases:

[UX + Business]

To encourage repeat purchases we implemented Saved Payment Method features for our core payment methods, Credit Cards and PayPal. The feature was an immediate success, with more than 60% of purchasers saving credit cards for later use.

We hypothesised that this feature would contribute to an increase 60 Day Average Purchases.

We saw 60 Day Average Purchase sum increase by 4.3% and average purchases per user increase by 6.5%.

Modularity & Extensibility:

[UX + Tech]

A forward-facing decision during this project was to build this page with separate purchase method, credits, + receipt sections. This meant that users would be able to use the same checkout page whether they were buying a lesson, a package of lessons, an online english test, or anything that we wanted to sell in the future.

As a user, this made the checkout process smoother and more self explanatory.

This solution saved the development team hundreds of developer hours, and countless hours of re-implementation in the future.

increasing coupon visibility:

[UX + Business]

Another focus area for the payment page was the Coupon use entry link and popup. Previous iterations of this page had undervalued coupons visually, while our Chinese website had seen very positive results through coupon use.

Thus we built a coupon redemption flow that was easy to understand and seamless to use, establishing a foundation for the marketing team to use in the future to sell more lessons and lead more innovative campaigns.