GlossGenius Instant Payouts
Empowering beauty professionals with greater control of their funds by enabling faster payouts.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Skills
UX Research, UX/UI Design, Prototyping, Testing, Project Management
Timeline
Feb 2023 - June 2023
Background
GlossGenius is a vertical SaaS platform for small business owners across the salon and studio space. The GlossGenius app provides users a complete set of automated appointment scheduling, payment processing, same-business-day transfer, client management, and built-in marketing solutions designed to empower professionals to focus on being creators, not admins. Learn more about what GlossGenius does.
Project Overview
The instant payouts project aimed to provide professionals with rapid access to their earnings, enhancing their financial flexibility to manage business and personal needs effectively. By enabling seamless and convenient access to funds, the project empowered professionals by offering a timely solution for meeting their financial obligations.
The Challenge
Due to the existing payout schedule, professionals were facing a delay in accessing their earnings. Typically, professionals will process 35% of their payments on Fridays and Saturdays, but any funds accrued over the weekend are not released until Monday. This posed a challenge, as professionals rely on their earnings to manage both their business and personal expenses. Limited funds in their bank accounts prevent them from addressing immediate financial needs, emphasizing the need for quick access to their hard-earned money.
The research
Based on user interviews, we uncovered that professionals were utilizing alternative solutions that provided instant access to their earnings. It became apparent that many users preferred Square payments specifically for its instant payouts feature which allowed users to receive their funds in 30 min or less. Furthermore, data revealed that instant payouts was the top payments feature request among professionals who had not adopted GlossGenius Payments which motivated us to prioritize it as a table stakes feature.
Constraints
While we did competitive analysis on other instant payouts features and had a good understanding how they worked, we had several constraints that would influence how we could implement it in our app.
Stripe
GlossGenius uses Stripe to process payments and their API for instant payouts is still new. What requirements were necessary on the backend to make it work with our existing payout structure?
Eligibility criteria
How do we differentiate the experience for eligible users vs. non-eligible users?
CX Bandwidth
Most customer experience calls are about money which is often a very sensitive subject. How can we empower users to quickly self-serve when they encounter issues with the feature without contacting support?
Fraud
How can we protect our users from bad actors who might take advantage of the quick payout?
The Beta
Given the constraints above, we decided to roll out a private beta with a limited scope to our user testing group that fit eligibility requirements. The beta aimed to gather feedback promptly and gain insights into additional requirements that should be addressed before a public launch.
(click to expand images)
Initial Exploration
For the first iteration, I explored adding a Payout Now CTA and debit card support into the existing Payouts screen. We also added a Payout button in the Menu for better feature discoverability.
Second iteration
We decided to remove debit card support for the MVP. While instant bank account support was new for Stripe, we decided to take a calculated risk since our existing payout structure already required linked bank accounts. I also fleshed out the different error states that a user might encounter and how we could help them troubleshoot.
Final iteration
The team was asked to cut scope in order to launch an MVP sooner. We simplified the flow by separating the Payout Now button to its own screen and renaming the existing Payouts screen to Bank Details for clearer distinction.
Beta Learnings
Debit card support
We quickly learned that 44% of our beta testers were unable to use the feature due to having unsupported bank accounts. We were able to confirm with Stripe that many of those same users were banking with institutions that allowed real-time payments to debit cards which meant that enabling debit card support would allow them to take advantage of this feature.
Fee calculation
Most instant transfer features deduct the fee from the requested amount. Stripe’s API required us to add it to the requested amount instead. Given that difference in experience, we needed to make it clear to professionals how much they could expect to receive in their bank vs how much was getting withdrawn from their in-app balance with the added fee.
Reporting
With the rollout of Instant Payouts, professionals were calling in more to ask about payout details for both Instant and Standard Payouts. This required manual work for the CX team as they had to generate those reports for them.
Eligible vs non-eligible
Even if a professional was not able to use the Instant Payouts feature, it was still important to help them have insights into their earnings. We needed to create a non-eligible view that was comparable to the information Instant Payouts users were receiving.
Public Launch
Using the learnings from the beta test, we created a new and improved version of the feature for general release.
Payout flow
Link Debit card Flow
The Impact
$322K of GPV requested within 3 days of launch
Consistent use of feature throughout the week (more than original hypothesis of weekends only)
User satisfaction and conversion of competitor users
