Convictional’s Chargeback Pivots

Background

Recognizing the growth limitations of the dropship platform, Convictional planned to expand into the wholesale domain, where supplier compliance is a significant issue. Non-compliance can result in fines consuming up to 1-5% of suppliers’ margins. With only two months to develop the initial MVP and launch the initial outreach, time was a critical factor.

My Role

Sole Designer

Lead UX research workshop

Product Discovery

Usability research

Define User Flows

Hi-Fi Design

The Problems

Convictional lacked essential knowledge and insights into wholesale compliance. As a company we needed to:

• Identifying Opportunities: How might we identify new opportunities within wholesale compliance, validate ideas, and challenge our existing assumptions to create more effective solutions?
• Understanding Challenges: How might we gain a deeper understanding of compliance challenges faced by suppliers and align our strategies to effectively address these issues?

For wholesale compliance

• Minimizing Financial Impact: How might we help suppliers minimize the financial impact of non-compliance fines in the wholesale domain, ensuring they retain more of their margins?

Process & Solution

Stage 1 - Discovery

Objective: Identify relevant customers, understand their needs, and build empathy.

To address these challenges, we started with a discovery phase:

• Empathy Workshop: I led a company-wide workshop to review call clips, define personas, build empathy maps, discover needs, and map necessary actions. This helped us identify that “Sellers” (suppliers, vendors, wholesalers) were most motivated to solve compliance issues due to the significant impact on their margins.
• Follow-up Questions: I worked with PM to provide targeted questions for business development calls to better understand the seller’s process, focusing on their current compliance workflows, challenges, and pain points.

Stage 2 -
Balancing Innovation with User Needs

From our discovery phase, we identified chargeback management as a critical pain point. Chargebacks resulted in financial penalties and involved complex, time-consuming dispute resolution processes.

Initial Chaos

During the initial exploration of compliance solutions, leadership was excited about the automation potential of LLM. However, the process became chaotic due to continuous changes in direction driven more by technical limitations than user-focused problem-solving.

My Approach

I decided to take a step back and refocus on customer pain points and develop MVP mockups for chargeback management, a frequently mentioned issue in customer calls. This approach also targeted the Finance team, providing faster user feedback due to their strong motivation to address this issue.
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Then I collaborated with the PM to conduct user calls with potential prospects to validate our assumptions. We iterated on the mockups based on their feedback.

Outcome

Mockups received positive feedback, providing a clear product direction and moving the project forward despite initial chaos.
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Established more structure and frequent feedback loops by scheduling weekly calls with design partners to better align with their needs.

Stage 3 - Rapid Development

As chargeback management grew rapidly with new features, UX debts accumulated. Although it was an early-stage MVP, I believed good UX was crucial for the product’s first impression and usability. As we moved to phase two of outreach, I advocated for additional UX improvements:

• Restructured the Chargeback table to better highlight chargeback status.
• Revised chargeback details to provide a better hierarchy for important information and actionable insights

The final design addressed key needs:

• Easily track chargebacks and create tickets efficiently.
• Automatically pull violation descriptions and use LLM to suggest next steps.
• Streamline the chargeback process by centralizing data, communication, and evidence.
• Provide high-level chargeback insights at a glance.

Outcome

By the end of the project, we successfully collaborated with two design partners for product feedback and feature enhancements, securing commitments from three companies preparing to sign contracts as paid customers.

However, by early 2024, the e-team strategically decided to pivot to a new focus area outside of retail, reallocating resources and terminating the chargeback project.

Takeaways

Timing is everything

During our rapid development in Q4, Black Friday slowed our feedback loop as compliance issues were not prioritized. Fortunately, feedback resumed once the sales season slowed down.

A picture speaks a thousand words

While understanding a prototype can improve communication of ideas, immediate customer buy-in with a simple mockup starts generating valuable feedback right away.

Balancing technology with user needs

Looking back, I recognize the importance of balancing technological possibilities with user-focused solutions. Ensuring that the excitement around new technologies doesn’t overshadow user needs is crucial.