Third Party Inventory Platform
Make Groupon a Daily Habbit
I lead the designs for Groupon third party inventory platform integrations, aiming to create seamless experience for users.
One of Groupon's Goal is to become the first place users look for local services, in order to to become a daily habit, we need to have sufficient inventory so that a user always find what they need. However, traditional way of merchant acquisition takes a lot of effort and time. As a result, an automated API integration platform, Groupon Third Party Inventory Platform, was introduced.
With the goal of increase inventory, we partner with a few different partners for different kind of services, for example beauty service and reservation, and events and tickets. These deals exist in Groupon in different ways, based on the existing technology constraints and level of collaboration. However, to Groupon users, it should not matter on the forefront of their experience.
" How can we build a seamless experience for different types of deal integration? "
There are 2 main principles that I developed during the process of working with third party partners.
GROUPON FIRST EXPERIENCE
User come to Groupon and purchase on Groupon, and they ask for help from Groupon. We don't reveal the complexity behind the scene unless it's necessary.
Setting User expectation
When a user have to perform a task that's different from usual, we need to set clear expectation for users.
Design system
We don't want to reinvent the wheel every time we collaborate with a new partner, it's important to setup design system and pattern and reuse them as much as possible.
Link out deals are the deal where users have to finish purchase in an external website.
We use different elements on deal details page, interstitial page to set up context for users to go to and external website.
To keep users in Groupon app context, we decided to use a in-app browser to open the partner website.
1. Limited Options
Tickets deals with limited options, concerts for example, are relatively easy to handle, we use our existing option selection pattern for tickets selection.
In my Groupons, users will see clear purchase history and where the tickets were sent to.
2. Reoccurring Events
Reoccurring events usually has a fixed schedule. A Broadway show for example, happens every other Friday. For these kind of shows, we use a calendar + time selection to avoid showing too many options at the same time.
3. Sports Events
Sports events on the other hand, is very seasonal, games happen in continuous months. Also sports fans might have a specific game in mind versus a casual viewer wants to pick the cheapest option.
Based on these considerations, we decided to use list for option display with the filters available.
Booking deals are deals which users make a reservation for their favorite beauty service online. Booking deals does not offer a deep discount, but Groupon offers a 5% Groupon Bucks which can be used in the next Groupon purchase.
The booking flow was already established at the time, with this partner, I focused mainly on translating the booking experience into a Groupon visual language.
This particular partner was the most difficult one out of all. Because this partner does not have a existing API integration flow, I had to introduce a new purchase flow that make sense for this travel product.
On the other hand, our integration also requires a responsive design so that it can be easily implemented on both web and mobile platform.
Also given that these travel deals requires a lot of personal information input, which was also complicated.
I started by looking into this partner's existing product, and dig into their purchase flow. By mapping out the key steps in the process, I can simplified the flow in Groupon context.