Cashrewards Product Search
The Opportunity
Cashrewards is the premier cashback platform in Australia, giving consumers a percentage (typically 5-10%) of their purchase price back as cash, simply by shopping at partner retailers.
This creates an attractive ecosystem for both consumers and merchants, promoting brand awareness, loyalty, and driving revenue. However, Cashrewards members don’t have an easy way to find out which retailer offers the products that they’re looking for.
An opportunity arose to help our members streamline their shopping journey. My team, the Search Squad, covered all aspects of the search experience and were well placed to dive into this opportunity.
My squad comprised of:
- Product Manager
- Tech Lead
- 4 Engineers (2 Backend + 1 Web + 1 App)
- Myself, as the Product Designer
I was responsible for conducting problem discovery with my PM, producing low and high fidelity prototypes, leading user interviews, and collaborating with my tech lead and engineers to deliver a successful build.
Purchase Journey
User interviews revealed the typical purchasing journey for a member:
- Idea to buy a product
- Research features on Google
- Compare prices on Google Shopping
- Check out a retailer that sold the product
- Check whether Cashrewards offers a cashback discount
- Calculate and record discounted price
- Complete purchase with retailer offering lowest discounted price
This process was lengthy and required manual calculations. The member may also forget to shop through Cashrewards, thereby losing out on cashback and revenue for the merchant.
Product Search
Our members expressed a desire to synthesise all the information that they needed in one place, in order to make an informed decision quickly and easily.
My PM and I formalised the problem into an opportunity canvas, detailing the user problem, current flows, and benefits to our customers, which included the consumer, merchants, and our retail partners.
I conducted competitive analysis of other shopping platforms. Being able to search for products across all retailers would enable us to solve a major pain point for our members, as well as put us on the leading edge of features in the consumer cashback industry.
Multi-factored Complexity
The success of this significant addition depended on several factors:
- Seamless usability, ensuring that it was truly a one-stop shop to compare products across retailers
- Data quality and correctness
- Breadth of merchants whose products appeared
A new pipeline needed to be built to ingest data about the products. We partnered with a 3rd party data provider to achieve this, with the volume and quality of data improving over time.
Prototyping and Research Methodology
I prototyped the user flow with varying level of features, in close collaboration with my squad PM and tech lead to ensure feasibility.
The first round of user testing sessions provided feedback on the north star direction that our members wanted. It revealed the beneifical impact of different features and helped us prioritise them based on resourcing and risk minimisation.
For example, the automatic calculation of net prices (store price less cashback), whilst desirable, was deemed too risky for our legal team until we could ascertain that the pricing data was correct. Users similarly expressed that they would be ok to check terms and conditions themselves as long as there was an easy way to access them.
MVP and Subsequent Releases
Designing the MVP was a complex interplay of usability, technical, resourcing, legal, and marketing challenges. To ensure that all stakeholders within the company were aligned, my PM and I kicked off the project with members across all of the above functions.
We established fortnightly sessions to check-in on the project plan, review latest designs and proof of concepts, and surface concerns and risks.
The full featured feature set was scaled back to its core whilst still delivering value for our members. In tandem with the design of the MVP, my PM and I established a loose matrix of capabilities that we wanted to deliver in subsequent releases.
Once the foundations of product search was created, the intent was to work in an agile manner, reviewing analytics, and deliver the next item of value as with any other aspect of the entire Cashrewards platform.
This cross functional check-in proved extremely valuable. Upon launch of the MVP, there were no significant issues or user complaints. Feedback from users were positive. Promisingly, they suggested advancements that were in line with what we anticipated from user research.
Auxiliary Capabilities
Unfortunately, shortly after the MVP release, the company underwent a strategic shift which led to the temporary halt of several major initiatives, including product search.
Whilst this was disappointing, many aspects of the design were incorporated into the core merchant search user journey. For example, introducing products into the search experience necessitated a rich e-commerce UI, which led to the design of advanced sort and filtering.
Analytics instrumentation for the initiative enabled clearer visibility of the user journey. In turn, this allowed our squad to uncover and implement other opportunities for the search experience, such as sponsored search results (Retail Media) and search suggestions & autocomplete.
Learnings
Working on this project was very exciting as we had the opportunity to change the way our members shopped on Cashrewards, leading directly to the vision that “every shop starts on Cashrewards”.
The responses from our user interviews on the prototypes were outstanding. In combination with member services feedback and market research, we were confident that we were building the right product.
The stakeholder check-ins from day 1 also demonstrated that with the right expectation and communication channels, we can achieve incredible synergy across design, product management, marketing, legal, and member services.
Ultimately, the project paused to meet short term strategic goals of the company. It was encouraging to realise that nothing is ever completely lost by reflecting on elements that still made their way into the product, and are sure to influence its evolution into the future.