ZIP
Merchant Sign-Up Optimisation
A complete overhaul of the application and onboarding experience for business owners adopting Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) as a payment solution.
Delivered clearer guidance and refined visual design throughout the entire onboarding journey — intuitive UX copy, comprehensive product education, new email communications, and a new self-serve onboarding hub.
OBJECTIVE
Increase sign-up and onboarding conversion for Zip's merchant application flow. With merchant users accounting for 40% of business revenue, this represented a significant opportunity for growth.
PROBLEM
• 55% of applicants were declined after completing the application flow.
• The majority of these declined applicants drove a high volume of daily customer support calls.
• Manual processes delayed applicant approval and onboarding integration.
USER PAIN POINTS
• A long application process, with a 14-day approval time caused by manual processes.
• Poor product education from the start of the application.
• Outdated, unbranded emails that lacked informative content.
ROLE
Senior Product Designer // End-to-end Design • Rapid Iteration Testing • UX Copywriting • Email Design
TEAM
Principle Product Manager
Software Engineers x10
RESULTS
The 12-month project was divided into phases and releases, allowing for swift optimisation, uptake monitoring, and quick follow-up enhancements.
Within the first quarter of release, successful applications increased by 40%.
The new, automated user journey reduced the sign-up timeframe from 14 days to an average of 3 days.
The email redesign led to a significant 30% decline in customer support contact regarding applications.
Mapped the entire application journey to identify key pain points and friction areas where improvements would create the greatest impact for customers.
Communicated new ideas and solutions, liaised with departments across the organisation for feedback, and kicked off the first phase of the new flow for live testing.
The sign-up flow was condensed from 56 form fields to just 10-15, efficiently identifying high-quality leads for successful applications. By removing unnecessary sections from the initial eligibility check, customers experienced a streamlined process — resulting in a higher approval rate for those who completed the flow.
Clean, responsive, and informative designs were created for in-store and online business owners, providing seamless access to self-serve onboarding resources.
By replacing the previous manual process — where support teams contacted each approved merchant individually — the new experience streamlined onboarding, reduced support burden, and accelerated time-to-activation for merchants.
The previous experience was off-brand and outdated, with UX that fell short of the product's standards.
New onboarding pages gave in-store and online business owners a clean, responsive, and informative self-serve experience.
The restructured sign-up emails featured a friendlier tone of voice and an updated visual design. Improved UX copy made it easy for customers to understand their application status and progress at every stage.
In collaboration with the PM, I mapped the complete email flow against the new application structure, identifying where each email would trigger based on user drop-off points. This gave us a clear framework for presenting the changes to stakeholders and engineers.
Releasing a new decline email significantly reduced the rate of customer support calls. New UX copy clarifying the reasons for unsuccessful applications led to better user understanding and fewer support enquiries.
The decline email was the biggest weak point in the application flow, driving a high volume of customer support calls — CS were fielding around 10 near-identical calls a day asking why applicants had been declined. Writing these emails meant balancing tone with CS's existing communication style, so I worked closely with the team throughout. We weren't able to share specifics about why an application was declined, so instead we focused on helping applicants understand how to get approved next time, along with clear reapplication timelines.
Rapid testing was implemented extensively throughout this project. Analysing the data on drop-off points allowed us, as a team, to understand why they were happening and design new solutions.
Analysing Fullstory recordings of user behaviour showed a long pause whenever applicants reached the ABN form field — we assumed they were searching for their number offline or navigating to the official ABN Lookup website. In response, we added a direct link to ABN Lookup within the form, which helped shorten the application timeframe.
A Hotjar poll added to the application flow let us gather data to understand where applicants were getting stuck. One finding was confusion around valid business phone number formats — at the time, only Australian numbers were accepted.
