Search is a key pillar in any functioning online marketplace. Rarely do users land on a marketplace accidentally, hoping to discover something new. This is especially true for live event ticketing marketplaces such as Vivid Seats (
NASDAQ: SEAT), where 2M+ users a day are actively searching for tickets to specific events. In this scenario, we need performant and relevant search to ensure the greatest user experience.
Problem
- Non-realtime updates to inventory.
- Slow search speed, especially during peak times.
- Higher maintenance and longer development time for new search features.
- Poor search relevance.
Solution
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Decoupling of search using a standalone service through event-driven architecture with direct integration to a third-party search provider (Algolia).
Results
- Increased first step conversion by 40%.
- Decreased search latency by 80%.
- Decreased search operation costs by 34%.
- Decreased update time from 5 minutes to <20 seconds.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of Canada announced the creation of Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) that provided eligible users affected by the pandemic, a recurring stipend. During periods when users were unable to work either due to illness, shortage of work or quarantine, the benefit would be paid out via cheques or direct deposit.
Problem
- Users needed access to funds ASAP.
- Large number of users did not have direct deposit set up with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).
- Signing up for online access to CRA and enrolling in direct deposit would take 10+ days.
- Financial institutions did not provide a way to enroll for direct deposit.
Solution
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To solve this problem, STACK partnered with the CRA to add direct deposit enrollment into the STACK app. This allowed users to easily enroll for direct deposit without needing to wait 10+ days for CRA online access, and ensured funds can be accessible sooner.
Results
- Increased number of new users on STACK by 140k.
- Completed integration in 4.5 business days.
Driving the growth and adoption of a platform is not a simple task. This difficulty is further compounded when the product is ancillary to a user’s established workflow, is subject to periodicity, and when the customer and the user are different. With BenchSci, I was tasked with driving the growth and adoption of the platform by establishing Product Led Growth (PLG) in the platform and as an organization-wide mindset.
Problem
- Low adoption and retention of the platform (users are not finding value).
- Core product is subject to periodicity.
- Organization is highly sales-led.
Solution
- Formed a cross-functional growth squad was formed to elicit support and representation from different teams in the organization.
- Created an experimentation framework to more easily test new ideas to improve adoption. This was used to collect a pool of prioritized ideas with direct user or business benefits where the end goal is to generate learnings.
- This led to experimentation on the homepage, search, onboarding and surfacing of key value features.
- Experiment results (good or bad) were then shared across the organization to establish PLG mindset.
Results
- Increased platform adoption by 40%.
When a user enters the shopping journey and completes search, finds what they are looking for, and arrives at the final step of checkout, the last thing most marketplaces want is to lose this high-intent user just as they are completing payment and submitting their order. With Vivid Seats operating in the highly competitive secondary live event ticketing space, along with search, payments is a key pillar to ensuring a positive user experience (reliability, speed, and options) and ensuring that business goals are met (GOV).
Problem
- Users do not have access to the most modern payment methods and no option for Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL).
- Existing payment capabilities are built into a monolithic codebase and tightly coupled, making maintenance and adding new capabilities difficult.
- Payment processing is synchronous, creating bottlenecks during high traffic times.
Solution
- Design and build a new event-driven service for payments with a separate database and direct integration to external vendors and processors.
- Add a BNPL provider (Klarna) to give users an additional payment method for larger orders.
Results
- Average monthly GOV over $30MM from Klarna and Capital One alone.
- Reduced dropped payments by 26% with event-driven architecture and retries.
RATESDOTCA (formerly Kanetix) is one of Canada’s largest comparison sites and marketplaces for insurance and financial products. While Auto insurance is the key product, Tenant insurance is a growing segment due to rising housing costs. In 2018, most tenant insurance providers did not offer a streamlined online quoting and purchasing process, instead opting to have users go through an exhaustive questionnaire.
Problem
- High user frustration from long tenant insurance quoting flow with no guarantee of a low price.
- Low tenant insurance quote completion and purchase.
- Slow tenant insurance quoting product built on PHP.
Solution
- Reduced quote flow to less than 10 key questions to receive a valid quote.
- Redesigned and rebuilt tenant insurance quoting product with AngularJS and Python.
Results
- Increased tenant insurance conversion by 119%.