When StoreHub first launched, its core functionality was a point-of-sale (POS) system. It allowed merchants to add customers’ information into their POS through the BackOffice. The BackOffice was a desktop, behind-the-scenes part of the platform that allowed merchants to add, edit and delete their products, manage inventory, access business reporting and more.

StoreHub later expanded its product suite by introducing e-commerce functionality, allowing merchants to instantly publish an online store based on the products already available in their POS. With this flow, customers were able to purchase online from our merchants by either logging in or by checking out as a guest.

In the height of 2020 (think COVID19), StoreHub introduced three consumer-facing products. One product allowed F&B merchants to accept online delivery orders (Beep Delivery), another enabled table ordering for dine-in customers (Beep QR Order), and the third served as a loyalty program (Beep Cashback). This loyalty program rewarded customers with cashback after each purchase, which could be redeemed for future orders, encouraging repeat business.

With Beep Cashback, the customer’s unique identifier was their phone number, along with a one-time password verification (OTP) verification. This information enabled customers to claim their accumulated cashback or be quickly identified when using Beep Delivery or Beep QR Order.

The problem

With the introduction of multiple merchant/customer touchpoints, a few problems arose:

1. Point-of-sale (POS) customers could freely be added/created in the system, which meant that merchants could create anything and potentially store inaccurate data on their customers
2. With Beep Delivery/QR Order/Cashback, no name or e-mail address was captured. Customers were only identified via their mobile numbers; therefore, merchants had minimal information on their customers
3. If all customer information was to be compiled from all sales channels in the BackOffice, there would be multiples of the same customer and inflated total customer numbers for merchants ?
4. The linkage between Beep customers and point-of-sale customers already existed, allowing one Beep customer to be linked to multiple merchants, but no such linkage existed for online stores ?

The solution

After many discussions with product managers and the CTO, it was decided that the best way to solve this problem was to eliminate the concept of ‘online store customers’ category and merge it with ‘Beep customers’ segments. The plan was to extend Beep’s database structure to support existing ‘online store customers’.

This meant that:

1. Existing ‘online store customers’ could still log in with their e-mail/password or Facebook login, but moving forward, all new customers would have to use their mobile numbers and an OTP
2. Existing ‘online store customers’ would be encouraged to add their mobile numbers and verify through OTP after checkout. If they decided to add and verify their mobile number, they would then be able to log in with their mobile numbers as well as their email/passwords
3. A verified mobile number could not be changed within an account
4. If a customer wanted to claim their cashback in-store at the POS, they would need to give the cashier their mobile number
5. A customer shopping from an online store would also be able to claim cashback if a merchant had enabled the Beep Cashback loyalty program
6. The ability to check out as guest in online stores would create to exist, allowing merchants to collect data from all customers who purchased from them.

Below is a sample of what a customer would experience while checking out on the online stores:

How it translated into design

After numerous iterations and discussions, the final solution was as such:

The results?

Since it was difficult to test this solution on our merchant’s customers, the product manager closely monitored the feature to ensure it worked as expected, just in case.

After weeks of observing, we were able to gather these results:

The aftermath

The product manager ran an A/B test to see whether conversions were affected by removing the option to check out as a guest. The next development is giving customers the ability to use their collected Beep Cashback online and encouraging them to enter their mobile numbers to claim cashback from their online purchases.

Lastly, the remaining factor to work on is addressing the issue of customers potentially having multiple emails with the same mobile number. The ideal state would be to allow merchants to automatically merge their customers based on their mobile numbers, and prioritizing the most credible source of data from all the different touchpoints.