Pay was one of Fivestars’ biggest endeavors as a company. In just 1 year the the company shifted from solely a consumer loyalty company to processing over 100 million dollars as a payments company. As a design lead on the in-store team I owned all the consumer facing screens on our tablet product. These included all of our loyalty and payments flows. 

Starting

I transitioned from the consumer loyalty team to the payments team the fall of 2018. By then our our first prototype was in one location, but was very limited. My role was to take what was already there, improve upon it, design payments and loyalty features and bring it from and MVP to a GA product. 

Solution

Bringing the product to GA meant we had to have hit a bar for quality and features - set by both our product team and expected for our merchants. The bare bones of processing payments was there, but a lot of features were either missing or not polished enough. One of the biggest problems we had to solve was redeemed rewards on our new product (the key feature of our new product). Because of the decision to be a layer on top of the POS and integrate with windows rather than be our own POS software we had a few problems in our way. 

1. Not being able to directly communicate with the POS

2. Standardized rewards cause reconciliation issues

3. Macro technology isn’t advanced enough to auto apply the rewards

4. Cashiers will hit continue without applying the rewards

The solution (Pt 1)

My solution for this issue after taking into consideration all the hurdles, was to apply the reward on the native software and return to Fivestars mid flow. After a user selects a reward the cashier will exit Fivestars, apply the reward, then return to the payments flow. Our software re-OCRs the total and completes the transaction. Both the POS and Fivestars should have matching totals and the reward should be logged in both locations as well. 

The solution (pt 2)

The other part of the GA process for pay was designing a solution when we couldn’t integrate with a POS (a stand alone tablet). Because we couldn’t read any rewards or standardize the rewards we had to design a separate reward flow that discounted the total multiple ways ($ off, %off, new total). 

Results

Reward redemption and reconciliation were both improved and our product was able to go GA after that flow. Support calls were decreased after reward reconciliation was solved for our merchants.

The future

This flow is by no means perfect and hopefully can be improved up in the future. This is heavenly dependent on our ability to integrate 

Final Flow