Reimagine DoorDash Merchants onboarding Experience
Having a restaurant is a dream come true for many SMB merchants. DoorDash for Merchant is an online platform for SMBs and Enterprises to get tickets to DoorDash marketplace - providing widest range of selection and fulfill orders for their customers.
At the start of this project, only 25% merchants made to opening a store on DoorDash from when they started exploring. The team needed a better, simpler onboarding design to prevent churning, and a more personalized solution selling experience.
As the designer for DoorDash Merchant selection team, I envisioned and redesigned the onboarding platform that scales to multiple solutions, verticals, and selling method.
Company / Team
DoorDash / Merchant Selection and Onboarding
My Role
Researcher & Designer
Key Skills
User Research / Vision Design / Interaction Design / UI Design / Prototyping / Stakeholder Management
Today’s merchant onboarding experience
What’s wrong today?
Lack of awareness
Merchants have limited opportunities to grow their sales due to their lack of knowledge of solutions.
High friction
UI is not mobile optimized while we have 70% of merchants who start on mobile.
Repetitive
Each solution has its own onboarding process, where merchants manually input repetitive info.
Easily churned
Onboarding steps live outside of the Portal. Merchants have to rely on email to resume.
Ideation
How might we create a simplified and extensible platform?
The vision is allowing all merchants to self-serve onboard onto all DoorDash solutions.
I started by identifying the key opportunities based on merchants’ pain points, and circled around with stakeholders:
Assisted Merchant signup
As the Mx starts onboarding, we will leverage internal data parsing to identify the merchants in our lead list, pre-fill basic info to assist the sign up process.
Personalized experience
Merchants will be able to answer a few questions to find the right solutions to meet their business needs.
Multiple solution entry and management
Merchants will sign up and onboard to one or multiple solutions together. Sales will be able to tailor packages based on the bundle selected.
Track activation progress
Merchants will be able to track the activation progress of the store and each solution selected.
Vision designs
Let’s start the dream big
These vision prototypes were circled around with stakeholders, DoorDash leaders in order for us to get buy-in and resources. Later, Tony, DoorDash CEO, was super excited for this extensible onboarding platform, and looked forward to seeing the progress.
Fast Sign-up with SMS code
Merchants only needs to sign up with their phone number:
Use internal intel model to identify the store
As merchant enters the store address, we’ll identify the exact business they’re signing up for, and use the information we scrape to aid a speedy store setup later down the funnel:
Shopping cart experience for solution selling
Once merchant “shops” for the desired & recommended solutions, we’ll let them “check out” with a bundled pricing package:
Unified solutions tracking
Based on the solutions merchant chose, we’ll unify the activation steps and tracking to help merchant stay on top of their store go-live status:
Milestoning
Now, it’s time to plan The cupcake *
* At DoorDash, we tend to name our acronyms with food. Cupcake would be the MVP we ship to our users that would make a meaningful impact.
I collaborated with PM and Engineering team to phase out our vision in to 3 milestones. To start, we tested…
UI revamp
Today, 70% of merchants start onboarding from their mobile device.
Mobile web should be optimized with a cleaner flow throughout for easier and assistive navigation.
Simplified pricing plan page
Several research studies have highlighted that merchants find our packages confusing. 30% of merchants drop off.
We need to help Merchants understand the value prop of DoorDash and identify the differences between packages for an informed decision.
Defer banking input
Merchants don’t have banking info easily available and 35% of them drop off at this step during sign-up.
We should test moving this step to post-onboarding to help reduce friction during signup.
Portal as source of truth
Onboarding steps live outside of the Portal. Mx have to rely on email to resume onboarding and then learn how to use the Portal post sign-up.
Onboarding platform
We were able to extend this platform to flower shops as the first new vertical
“Awesome!
Lets keep working this vector as there is a LARGE long tail of Merchants across all verticals.”
Tony Xu
CEO of DoorDash
We didn’t stop…
In Progress
Milestone 1 was so impactful, we continued to platformize the onboarding experience, and scale the experience to other solutions by adding personalized recommendations based on merchant’s current operations.
Impact
This launch was a hit
The redesign was a hit amongst merchants and sales reps. It set the foundation for future product releases, such as extending the onboarding to other verticals and solutions.
40%
Increase in new sign-ups
$14M
Increase in GMV
8%
Increase in activation