Sezzle empowers young adults to save money for their future spendings or to fund their current Sezzle installments. Sezzle encompasses multiple offerings for customers, including the Sezzle points program, which provides an innovative environment space for young adults to shop from the professionally curated
collections of merchants using their earned Sezzle points. The brand mission of Sezzle is to financially empower the next generation. They created a sustainable cycle of rational spendings, responsible budgeting and savings. This feature allows customers to build a good financial empowerment emission.
This project's goal is to renovate Sezzle by building a new platform. I collaborated with Cornell Tech students to investigate the company. conducted research to identify problems, and approached solutions that are potentially uplifting to the brand.
DATE Jan 2022 - May 2022
TAGS UI/UX, Product Studio
INSTRUSTOR Josh Hartmann
DESIGNER Jialin Huang
The Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) industry is highly lucrative and competitive as its landscape keeps changing with new upcoming competitors and acquisitions. The BNPL ecosystem consists of consumers, retailers, creditors, and financial institutions.
Sezzle ’s mantra of “Doing Business with a Purpose”
Lastly with the numerous breaches of secure information such as Solarwinds, Equifax, Capital One etc. leaking of private data could is a major concern that never truly is solved.
Klarna offers Muti BNPL financing options. Users can split their cost into four payments with no interest fee. Klarna's users enjoy 30 days of no-reason-to-return with no interest fee.
Affirm provides the BNPL purchases of up to $175,000. Affirm brands themselves as a company with no hidden, extra and late fees, providing users with financial loans.
Uplift provides BNPL options for financing travel by leveraging their partnerships in the airline and cruise industry. However they are not providing any BNPL support for dailylife products.
Afterpay offers a BNPL model that is very similar to Sezzle. Users can choose to split their purchases in six weeks with no interest fee. Afterpay will charge for the late payments, and they will keep track of users who are---delinquent in their payments.
Balance is a B2B e-commerce platform that offers self-serve checkout between businesses and merchants, assisting with b2b payments ranging from wire transfers, ACH, cards, automatic payments etc.
Paypal is one of the companies leading with the highest user market penetration in the BNPL industry. PayPal provides users a six month window without any interest.
I am honored to interview six students from Cornell Tech and Parsons School of Design, as well as one instructor who is currently working in Sezzle Product Management Department, to get in-depth of the user experience and to seek further explanation from the designer's perspective. I have collected their feedback of Sezzle and user experiences with other BNPL service providers.
Product Narrative - (Sezzle Safe)
Sezzle Safe helps to fulfil the financial empowerment aims for next generation shoppers. Sezzle users can build a responsible financial foundation by building credit scores, managing expenses and income; Shoppers on Sezzle get faster approvals, no interest payments and improved credit scores long term. SezzleRound supports users' small purchases through BNPL. At the same time Sezzle supports users' large spending goals, for instance, medical emergencies and big retail purchases during sales season. Sezzle Safe also illustrates to new customers what a previous successful buyer's journey looked like. When looking at successful buyers' journeys, Sezzle Safe suggests to current users that they deposit an additional 5% of their everytime purchases with Sezzle and thus save for the future.
After my ideation, I make a questionnaire and receive 159 responses based on their interested in BNPL and Sezzle Save program. By studying their daily consumption behavior. I got the result below:
01.
Add item to shopping cart
We started an offline testing of the two scenarios. We simulated a checkout interface for the test population to evaluate the practicability of the 'round up' feature.
02.
Enter shipping address
User entering their shipping adress.
Experiment A
Sezzle Safe after checkout
Introduce you to Sezzle Safe after checkout. Link users who interested in Sezzle Safe to Sezzle website.
Experiment B
Sezzle Safe during checkout
The Sezzle Safe round-up feature automatically transfer 5% of the total sales price to the Sezzle Wallet. This feature financially empowers the users to form a responsible spending and saving habit.
75% of the respondents prefer to see the selection of Sezzle Save during the checkout. Some of the respondents claimed that they tend to leave the checkout interface quickly after payment. And they paid little attention to the ads after the transaction is approved.
Login and select the items you want to buy
Select items through filter
Make purchases using Sezzle save
Introduce to Sezzle Save
Welcome to Sezzle
Introduce to Sezzle Save (Desktop Website)