<aside> 💰 Checkout is not a separate product that we offer at Winuall. It is the last stage of the Product Marketplace that comes into play when the user wants to buy a course that the tutor had listed on their public store. It is the same as what you would expect from any other e-commerce website checkout flow, with a few caveats.

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As a company, Winuall provides a white-labeled digital platform for tutors and coaching centers. Imagine you as a tutor in the digital era, and would need a plethora of tools to conduct classes online viz. WhatsApp for messaging and class groups, Google Classroom for managing assignments and tests, some other platform to conduct quizzes, Zoom for your live classes, and so on. Winuall bundles all these essentials and gives you a single dashboard to run your institution online.

The Problem

While Winuall's public store offering broadly resembles that of any other e-commerce store, we have made a few optimizations to prime the offering for our customers. The biggest of them is gearing the checkout for single-product purchases. While working with our customers, the team had realized early on that students tended to purchase individual items from the tutor's/institution's public store. Since a majority of items on the store were online courses, test series, and webinars, there were extremely limited occurrences of a user buying more than one item (by limited, I mean approximately once every 27,000 purchases) in a single session.

Because of this, the team did away with the cart method. Whenever someone clicked on Buy Now, we used to directly open a modal from our payment provider where the user entered the details and paid the necessary amount.

This worked well for a time when we did not have to think about volume. As the volume of transactions increased, issues started creeping in -

• There was no messaging for a scenario when payment failed or took more than usual time.
• There was no way to address the errors that happened due to a user not being registered or logged in.
• We had the infrastructure ready to ship coupons, but could not because the old Checkout did not provision a way to apply coupons.

Besides these, our customers were also slightly miffed by the fact that they cannot change much of the branding on the payment modal. These were the primary issues we had to solve for.

<aside> 💰 We prioritized the exact pain points on the basis of the recurring requests that flooded our support channels viz. tutors complaining that students have paid but have not received access to their products, often because of a snag that we failed to detect and inform the user about.

There was not a lot of deep pre-research on this product. We took the existing snags we knew we were hitting, looked at other established checkout patterns available, added our own insights, and kept coming up with designs. Thereafter, we tested them with our users and kept on iterating the smaller parts, until we had something we knew we could ship.

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<aside> ⚠️ Disclaimer I mentioned coupons above, but a lot of separate thought went into implementing the coupons feature, both in terms of creating a coupon for the tutor, and redeeming a coupon by the user. In the shots below, you would see what the coupons section looks like, but how it works under different situations is a separate issue NOT covered in this essay.

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The Solution

We re-imagined the entire Checkout experience to ensure visibility and transparency.