One of the primary payment partners at EKM is Klarna who have a partnership with EKM to encourage new sign-ups to join Klarna as their main payment gateway.
In late-2018 I was asked to create a new onboarding process to prime and profile customers in order to make their initial experiences with EKM better.
Klarna has strict rules for sellers and shops selling certain products (CBD Oils for example) are prohibited from selling using the Klarna payment processor.
The new onboarding process was a joint project with Klarna in order find out whether or not a shop was intending on selling special categories of products and if they were, we would hide the option to register with Klarna.
The reason behind hiding the option, instead of just discouraging signups, is because the signup process with Klarna from the EKM side is fairly automated (we submit an application with the customer’s details on behalf of the customer) and from there it’s a manual process for Klarna. Klarna was using a lot of resources manually rejecting applications for disallowed products.
Note: The term onboarding is somewhat misused in this article but it’s the internal name for the project. Onboarding would be the entire user flow from signup to a significant point – perhaps first sale in ecommerce. Onboarding in this project was the initial steps after the signup flow where we collect user and subscription details.
Competitor research
Steps
After the customer has completed the signup form and provided payment details they are redirected to the onboarding flow. The onboarding process follows these steps:
1. Survey
The first step in this flow as the customers a few simple questions about their business. These questions are important to EKM to understand who the customers are. We also plan on using these answer later to tailor their experience.
- Are you already selling?
- What is your annual revenue?
- Do you sell any of the following products?
- Are you VAT registered?
If the third question is answered as Yes we remove Klarna options throughout EKM and suggest a different gateway.
If the fourth question is answered as Yes we ask for the user’s VAT number and this is prefilled when needed by payment partners and features.
2. Dashboard
The dashboard is designed as a way of guiding new shop owners through the process of setting up a shop as well as delivering tips and tricks to help their business succeed.
Before a shop can be ready for launch we encourage certain steps be taken:
- Your shop must be named (we actually ask for this during signup, so it’s auto ticked)
- Customise your design: Shops get a default theme, but we recommend shop owners select a theme tailored to their industry.
- Add products: It’s a requirement that an online shop has at least one product listing.
- Start accepting payments: This is when the customer applies to Klarna. We use details already gathered during signup and onboarding to make this process quicker.
These steps are none linear so the shop owner can complete them in whatever order they want.
Wireframe Prototype
With the requirements and outline from Klarna and a meeting scheduled in mid-2018 a rough wireframe prototype showing the user’s journey was created using Marvel (Password: jFpJ7Pc*ofmQHEqrVNuH).
After the meeting with Klarna we opted for user journey that had fewer steps and was overall more simple for users. Klarna also requested that we remove the onboarding for PayPal (as competitors) and also display that as a fallback when Klarna is disallowed. Version 2 Marvel prototype (Password: jFpJ7Pc*ofmQHEqrVNuH)
These were very rough prototypes to test an idea pin down a user journey.
Final product
The second meeting to discuss the new onboarding process was scheduled for January 2019 with Klarna. I left the company before the meeting and it was picked up by another designer.
A variation of this onboarding process is in-use today.
