The problem

40% of anonymous users abandoned checkout due to initial sign-up wall - costing ~$30M/month.

I was asked to reduce drop-off by letting guests complete purchases.

What’s causing 40% of users dropping off?

The obvious assumption was friction - simply asking user to signup was too much effort. But I wondered what were the visitors feeling emotionally? There was a core misalignment between business needs (retention) and user needs (wanting to try first).

I partnered with a user researcher to interview 10 guest users, and the concern of spamming and data security from guest users validated my hypothesis.

It revealed that friction wasn’t the real blocker - trust was.

I reframed the problem and led improvements to form UX and strategic flow design.

Establishing baseline: Direct to guest checkout

To meet the brief quickly and set a testing baseline, the team and I implemented ‘direct to guest checkout’ flow.

It removed account creation entirely and let users complete a purchase instantly.
But it didn’t build trust or help with retention, so I treated it as a control variant for experimentation.

Audit checkout flow, test for optimization and trust

Working with cross-functional teams, we audited the checkout flow together and identified 3 opportunity areas to optimize UX.

The updated design focused on clarity, reassurance, and reducing cognitive load for first-time users.

The optimized checkout form was A/B tested against the direct to checkout flow. Result showed Optimized version increased order conversion by 20%.

Demonstrated that users checkout with more confident, and trust-diven UX moved the needle.

Balancing short term conversion and long term retention

Direct-to-checkout flow suffers because there’s no way to convert guests into registered users, and Mercari’s success depends on customer lifetime value.

I led competitive analysis to look for industry guest checkout pattern, and saw an opportunity to address registration prompt.

I designed 2 variants to A/B test: Button-based login vs Streamlined login. Results showed that Streamlined login increased sign-up rate by 15%.