CONSUMER EXPERIENCE

INTRODUCTION & GOAL

The spring of 2020 was a tumultuous and difficult time for everyone. Small restaurants especially. A native online ordering (OLO) solution had been on Clover’s roadmap, but once pandemic-related shutdown began across much of the country, it became the single most important project of the company. We were told to define, design, develop and release an MVP in less than a month (2 weeks).

While adjusting to our new reality and working across several time zones, everyone on the team was putting in abnormal hours in our collective effort to get this lifeline out to our merchants.

Unlike competitors, Clover's business model didn’t require us to take 30% commission fees out of each transaction to make ends meet. Our focus was to release something that was immediately useful for our merchants, while providing a competitive UX for our customers to stand a chance against established competitors like Uber Eats, Doordash, and Grubhub.

PROCESS & EXPERIENCE

Due to our accelerated timeline, we took a very bare-bones approach with our initial release. The objective of the first release was simply to provide an end-to-end experience for placing an order for pick-up. While the OLO space is saturated and largely homogenous, I cataloged competitor experiences to draw attention where one broke pattern from the others.
I wanted to understand why they decided to digress and evaluate whether it was enhancing the experience or not.

THE OUTCOME

Clover’s online ordering product was a huge success and the primary source of revenue throughout 2020.

As time went on, my team continued making product enhancements, including custom image support, and integration with digital wallets like Apple Pay. We added support for a variety of order types including curbside pickup, contactless in-store dining, and delivery. We added order scheduling so that our merchants could still make sales even when they weren’t open for business. We launched in Canada, Ireland and the UK (July 2020).

With virtually no marketing effort / budget, we saw $110 M in transactions, roughly $0.5 M in GPV daily, and over 20k merchants enrolled within the first year after launch.