GoDaddy to Google's Merchant Center
Making it easier for GoDaddy users to connect to Google's Merchant Center
Overview
GoDaddy's Marketplaces and Social selling solution allows merchants to sell through various platforms. Users could sell their goods and services on platforms such as; Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, and Walmart. During the summer of 2021, GoDaddy partnered with Google. Enabling GoDaddy users to sell their products on Google's network. Giving GoDaddy users the ability to reach millions more shoppers.
Team
Product Management | Engineering | Google Strategic Team
Role
Sr. UX Designer
Company
GoDaddy
The Challenge
GoDaddy users faced connecting issues since the launch of Google’s integration. Which prevented users from successfully creating a Merchant Center account with Google. Both teams collaborated to consolidate and optimize this onboarding flow. The challenge was to simplify the onboarding flow to reduce the 44% of failed accounts.
The Hypothesis
Optimizing the onboarding flow reduced the number of accounts getting disapproved and resolved related issues. The updated flow enabled users to supply Google with their required business information and reduce the amount of failed accounts to less than 10%.
Discovery
GoDaddy aimed to streamline the Google onboarding process for its users. We accomplished this by automatically sending the user’s business information to Google after they signed up with their Google account. This allowed users to quickly and easily add Google as one of their sales channels.
Users didn’t need to confirm or verify if the business information sent to Google on their behalf was correct. My investigation uncovered several issues with this approach.
GoDaddy online stores don’t require any business information to validate if the business is real.
Users could input their business information in multiple areas throughout the GoDaddy e-commerce platform.
The Problem
GoDaddy's inability to collect and transmit the necessary business information to Google resulted in up to 49% of new Merchant Center accounts getting disapproved.
Hypothesis
Optimizing Google's onboarding process and enabling users to input their business information would increase account creation success rates. The updated onboarding flow prompts users to provide their business phone number, address, and verify its website. This aligns with Google's requirements to create a Merchant Center account.
How might we “optimized” and increase “personalization” to the current experience?
Design Decisions
Business Information
Users had multiple ways to add their business's information to their GoDaddy website and account. And they weren’t connected to one another. Resulting in there being no source of truth for the business’s information.
Without a source of truth for the user's business details, how can we ensure that Google received the required information? Not being able to provide Google with the necessary business information caused a lot of issues.
To ensure Google received the necessary business information, the onboarding process was updated with business address, phone and website verification steps.
Design Decisions
Business Address
The implementation of a verified business address in the onboarding flow led to a decrease of 22% in the number of disapproved new account creations, reducing it from 49% to 27%. Further improvements to address backend issues are expected to bring this number down to single digits.
Design Decisions
Phone Number Verification
Implementing phone number verification greatly improved account approval, reducing the disapproval rate from 30% to only 6%.
Design Decisions
Website Verification
My analysis found varying levels of account failure based on the verification of the website. The data revealed a fluctuation in failure rates from 30% to 6%, with a downward trend. Despite the decrease, it was unclear what caused the fluctuation. As we sought to understand our users' experiences with the onboarding process, we had not assessed the impact of this step.
So what was happening? Initially, I assumed that an email or notification banner would inform users of the necessary website verification. While this method effectively communicated the necessary actions users needed to take, it still created a pain point for them. As a result, the onboarding process and connecting to Google were not as seamless as we had hoped for.
The direct sign-up process with Google involves verifying and claiming the website. Completing this step is crucial to move past the onboarding flow to create an account. To enhance the onboarding experience for GoDaddy users, I suggested incorporating a step where users would verify and claim their website as part of the flow."
