Scan & Go enables Walmart/Sam’s Club shoppers to ring up and pay for their carts using their phones.
While popular in the US and Canada, adoption of Scan & Go in Sam’s Clubs throughout the Mexico market lagged significantly, putting one of Walmart’s major global initiatives at risk.
PROBLEM
Discovery research uncovered a crucial insight: shoppers in this market trusted conventional payment methods like bank cards and cash far more than newer technologies. Complex cultural and macroeconomic forces had led to new payment tech being regarded as untested, faulty, and vulnerable to hacks. And replacing the entire checkout line with just your phone? That’s about as newfangled as it gets.
OBJECTIVES
• Earn the trust of Sam’s Club Mexico shoppers by enhancing Scan & Go to feel secure and solid
• Increase adoption and usage in Sam’s Club MX retail locations
• Improve operational efficiency of retail locations via lower overhead costs
APPROACH
Scan & Go is a core feature within the main Sam’s Club mobile app, so our work focused on many of the secondary flows and entry points that intersected S&G throughout the customer journey. Based on our research and proven best practices from Baymard, we leaned heavily into trust indicators, stronger reassurances, loading state messaging (where appropriate), and some more subtle enhancements that helped cultivate a sense of trust and security.
Project Scope
The Scan & Go feature itself is just a camera view with an on-screen overlay and some helper text. So, driving adoption meant upping our Trust Indicator game across all the peripheral touchpoints that supported the feature.
Add Payment Method
We started with the Add Payment Method flow. This encompassed all types of trust indicators we wanted to employ, so it served as a blueprint and proof of concept.
This was also one of the first things that new users saw, so we had to make a good first impression. I conducted my assessment with simple red sticky notes calling out what was needed to align with best practices.
New Add Payment Flow
The new flow featured several enhancements – some overt, others subtle. Altogether, it led to a significant increase in the perception of security and trust.
The blue stickies call out new additions and show translations.
Side note: when writing for international audiences, expect English to get 30-50% longer when localized. My typical process was to draft in English, then pseudo-localize using a figma plugin. If the added text length was good, I then sent the file to our LoC team.
Onboarding
Next, we attacked the Scan & Go onboarding screens… or should I say, screen. The starting state featured the bare minimum – a single screen with some text.
You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, so we made sure the very first touchpoint set the right expectations. The new onboarding flow featured bright, engaging animations, shield icons in the artwork, and themes of security in the content.
Outcome
After launching these enhancements, we then expanded our approach to all other peripheral touchpoints, and some bigger ones too – “Pago seguro en línea” (meaning, pay securely online) became the global CTA for initiating checkout.
The results were swift, steady, and almost immediate. Analytics showed a steady increase in the number of net-new user sessions at Mexican Sam’s Club retail locations, as well as an increase in returning users, and increases in session duration.