Scan & Go enables Walmart/Sam’s Club shoppers to ring up and pay for their carts using their phones.
Adoption throughout the Mexico market lagged significantly behind the US and Canada. Discovery research uncovered why: shoppers trusted conventional payment methods like bank cards and cash far more than newer technologies due to a widespread misconception of new payment tech being untested, faulty and vulnerable to hacks.
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 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 best practices from Baymard, we prioritized trust indicators, stronger reassurances, loading state messaging, and some other subtle enhancements that helped cultivate trust.
IMPACT AND OUTCOMES
• Feature adoption in Mexico rose steadily, reaching parity with US and Canada adoption rates
• Increase in user trust led to a CTA I wrote getting adopted globally
Project Scope
The Scan & Go feature itself is just a camera view with an on-screen overlay, which meant upping our Trust Indicator game across all the other touchpoints that supported the feature.
Add Payment Method
We started with the Add Payment Method flow because it encompassed all types of trust indicators we wanted to employ. This made it a good 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 identifying 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 Flow
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 using:
• Bright, engaging animations
• Shield icons in the artwork
• Clear 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.