Pay with Ibotta™
// Case Study
Overview
What is Pay with Ibotta?
Pay with Ibotta is a way to pay for products and services at many retailers and restaurants. You earn cash back instantly on your entire purchase amount when you pay at checkout through the Ibotta app.
Role
Product Designer
Duration
June 2018 - April 2020
Squad
1 - 3 Product Managers
1 - 2 Engineering Managers
5 - 10 Mobile Engineers (iOS & Android)
1 - 2 Data Scientists
1 UX Researcher
Problem
Why create Pay with Ibotta?
After five years of success with their flagship receipt upload rewards product, Ibotta, began to see upward trending complaints about how complicated and time consuming the process has become over time.
Ibotta listened to its customers and decided it was time to create a faster & more efficient way to reward them when shopping at their favorite retailers.
Research
Discovery phase
We surveyed over 300 of our existing users and surfaced some interesting key insights:
87%
consistently wanted a faster way to shop and get credit for purchases without having to upload a receipt
91%
wanted to use the app as the primary tool to pay for their rewarded purchases
68%
would connect their debit/credit card to the app as long as the connection was bank-level encrypted
Ideation
Exploration phase
Based on our discoveries our team began to ideate on how best to start generating a holistic solution to our problem statement.
Prototyping & Testing
Testing phase
Armed with user data, wireframes, flowcharts and alignment - we were ready to begin creating a comprehensive prototype for user testing.
MVP Phase Tools
Sketch
InVision
Lookback
Launch Phase Tools
Figma
Zoom
UserTesting.com
Rollout
Initial launch
We rolled out an MVP of Pay with Ibotta in mid Q4 of 2018 to just 15% of our user base in order to minimize fraud, measure effectiveness and to test multiple usability metrics in order to see how well our product performed.
MVP Results
Steady increase of users who clearly preferred PWI over traditional receipt upload
Testing revealed customer confidence in using ACH instead of debit/credit cards
More testing revealed the need to tip at restaurants w/PWI
Fraudulent behavior led to adding more security
A Curveball
(or 2)
A new design system
In late Q4 of 2019 all squads were tasked with updating screens and functionality to align with our new design system, “Pando” as well as support for a linked-loyalty initiative.
We had one month to put aside all non-critical roadmaps to make sure this effort was completed before 2020. It was a success… barely.
Outcome
How is Pay with Ibotta?
Pay with Ibotta is now an industry leading payment service that helps millions of shoppers get instant rewards nationally.
National and local retailers continue to sign up to have Pay with Ibotta as an accepted form of rewarded payment in their stores.
1.6M users
are now using Pay with Ibotta daily to reward their everyday shopping
$15M+
in revenue has come in since Pay with Ibotta launched in Q4 of 2018
4 squads
have now spun up to support PWI. These new squads include trust building, fraud prevention, retention & marketing
200+ retailers
have signed up with Pay with Ibotta and the list continues to grow
5+ contracts
have been signed with the largest retail chains in the US to partner with this payment service