The Secret Deals of the Discount Whisperer

Hackathons are held annually at Razorpay and this July we saw great success from the event with 800 employees from all departments and sites involved. We don't merely create cool hacks but we also take the projects that come out of the hackathon into production! 🚀 This instance of Behind Closed Doors spotlights the narrative of the Affordability team from Razorpay. Ankita (the Product Manager), Manju (the Backend Engineer), and Aromal (the Frontend Engineer) - dubbed 'Team Upsellers' - come together to discuss their three-day hack that became available this month. We constructed an avenue for internet buyers to easily uncover the finest bargains. Our widget provides buyers insight into different deals and discounts to allow them to maximize their savings. We refer to it as "The Discount Whisperer" 😛 A big distinction between a typical Chrome extension for displaying available deals and our solution is that it has a wider scope. Large businesses with bank-funded offers, such as Flipkart and Amazon, are commonplace, but what about the small and medium-sized companies? Offers on these sites are usually merchant-funded, and, as Razorpay, we are able to access these deals due to the fact that the merchants use our Offers Engine on their website and apps. Thus, our service not only showcases offers funded by banks, but the ones that are run by the businesses themselves. Many affordability widgets concentrate on featuring particular product-related offers. They present a conventional and dull list of available offers with a certain price. Instead, our Discount Whisperer takes a distinctive approach: Apart from displaying offers while looking at various items, it also demonstrates extra offers that can be accessed with a minor elevation in the amount spent, to allow customers to make a knowledgeable choice. This strategy is one-of-a-kind due to its focus on providing shoppers with the most financial benefit, while also enabling businesses to increase their average order value and thereby achieve greater profit. We all have the same enthusiasm for improving user experience. There are two groups of users in the equation: shoppers who buy online and businesses that use Razorpay for payments. We wanted to aid shoppers in getting a great deal while also promoting development for businesses using Razorpay. This was heavily influenced by our personal experiences as frequent online buyers. Essentially, we aimed to make buying economical for customers and escalate order value for companies. Two for the price of one 🤘 It is noteworthy that this concept can be constructed in a mere 2-3 days. When examining the balance of work and results for the notion, it was evident that this concept was the most suitable for a hackathon lasting three days. We had a collection of unrefined concepts for the hackathon. A lot of them centered around the concept of affordability. One of our ideas was to construct an affordability calculator. Suppose you wanted to purchase something that was a bit more than you could manage. Our affordability calculator could provide the answer to the “How can I manage to buy this product?” inquiry. We contemplated presenting multiple feasible alternatives that the buyer might use to make the purchase. However, this notion was very basic and presented a lot of complexities for a hackathon. Therefore, we decided to go with the Discount Whisperer instead. Perhaps the affordability calculator could be a topic for a future hackathon 😛 At the hackathon, there was a rule that teams could only have a maximum of 4 participants, so Ankita was brought in as Product Manager. When Ankita spoke with Manju, the Backend Engineer, and Aromal, the Frontend Engineer, they were enthusiastic about the idea. Both of them had previously worked on the Razorpay Affordability suite and had a great understanding of the whole concept. When we heard about the hackathon, we knew that our focus would be on affordability. We gave ourselves multiple brainstorming sessions to come up with ideas, and then the Discount Whisperer was born. We influenced each other to perfect the idea quickly, and got to the point where everyone on the team had specific tasks that they would work on during the 72 hours of the hackathon. A couple of brainstorming meetings occurred prior to the hackathon initiation. During the first one, everyone contributed several ideas. At its conclusion, we decided to move forward with the Discount Whisperer project. The primary focus of this meeting was the ratio of effort to result. The second task was taken on the day prior to the beginning of the hackathon. It was intended to manage the entire project. Given the limited timeframe of 72 hours to construct, deploy, and present our idea, we needed to decide who was doing what and in what order. Moreover, there were many questions related to our product that remained unresolved. For instance, we weren't sure if we should incorporate payment-specific offers (e.g. 25% off HDFC credit cards) or go with general offers (e.g. 20% off any order). We couldn't tell if we could make use of the existing APIs and fetch the data we needed. Furthermore, there were many more questions concerning the implementation that we still had to figure out. Actually, no 🙈 We had a clear vision for the product, but there were a lot of intricate details that we ran into while working on the product during the hackathon. As is customary for hackathons, we had to narrow down the features to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An example of the difficulty that we faced was with the UX of the product; Instant discount, Cashback, and No-Cost EMI are the three main sorts of discounts available in the market. The initial two were straightforward to implement; however, No-Cost EMI was challenging. We had difficulty determining how to incorporate No Cost EMI into the Discount Whisperer. The Discount Whisperer gives the shopper insight into how much they are saving, especially for Instant Discounts and Cashback; these are usually given as a percentage of the overall amount. For No Cost EMI, however, it doesn't reduce any cost up front, but rather gives the customer the option of regular instalments. Tackling this complexity was something that could not be achieved in the 72-hour hackathon, so we decided to leave it to the side. Likewise, there were a few complicated instances: What would occur if two offers had the same price reduction value? Which one should be proposed to the customer? We had ample customer conversations documented as part of the Razorpay Affordability suite, giving us access to a year's worth of customer insights. These conversations provided ample validation that a Discount Whisperer would be beneficial for businesses. Additionally, we took cues from large enterprise businesses, whose shoppers enjoyed this product immensely. Design was a major component of this; thus, as someone keen on design, Ankita took on that responsibility while Aromal and Manju started working on the backend and frontend elements of the product. On day 0, we convened to address edge cases and hastily arrived at a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version, skipping debate and drawing inspiration from larger enterprises' websites. Those edge cases that couldn't be solved right away were set aside for a later date. An example on the engineering side was the query of how to display offers needing an eligibility assessment (not all offers can be accessed by everyone. A few require shoppers to qualify). To make both engineering and design simpler, we chose to set the eligibility check for the final day. The first two days were dedicated to making this MVP with as many edge cases taken into account as possible. We wanted to have a running prototype by early on day 3. Then, we would utilize the remaining few hours to fix the edge cases that had not been addressed. Even if we were unsuccessful in addressing them, we still had a fully functional basic prototype to show. The third day was somewhat chaotic as we had to perfect our working prototype and determine the proper narrative to exhibit to the judges. We all worked remotely, and the three of us were dedicated to the Razorpay Affordability suite. Accordingly, we could easily collaborate. Furthermore, a Slack channel was available for asynchronous communication, and when someone posted a Zoom link it was a cue for us all to join a Zoom meeting to discuss. As usual, we had our daily morning and evening check-ins, which ensured that everyone in the team was kept up to date, beginning and ending the day. On Day 3, we were faced with the task of finalising our prototype and coming up with an effective storyline to communicate our concept within a 7 minute presentation for the judges. Fortunately, our prototype was already operational, so I (Ankita) was able to create an impressive presentation to detail our plan and goals moving forward. Although we didn't succeed in advancing beyond the first round of the evaluation process, it became apparent everyone appreciated our idea and implementation. Our concept was not intricate, yet it had a sizable effect on the customers. Hence, our idea for customer experience was well-received. Hackathons at Razorpay are always something to look forward to, due to the strong backing of leadership for turning ideas into reality. We had almost completed 80% of our project already, and with the additional twenty percent of our own effort, all the last few details were taken care of. It was clear that we should focus our attention on our idea, as we had spent the year talking to customers and thoroughly validating it. We devoted the necessary extra effort and the product was launched. Expressing it numerically, it required us an extra week and a half to address all the quirkier scenarios so that we were able to go live. Although we didn't walk away victorious from the hackathon, we were thrilled since our little concept which originated in the hackathon was eventually launched into production. Today, there are three businesses that have implemented Discount Whisperer into their operations. This means that the concept we initially developed at a hackathon is now realized as a real product with an impact on businesses and customers online. Moreover, a large corporation has viewed the new feature and we are about to launch it. This is a significant achievement for our team that we are thrilled about. We aim to roll out the Discount Whisperer to more enterprises that use Razorpay. Our goal is to empower shoppers and help businesses boost their average order value through cost-effective online shopping. We intend to make the Discount Whisperer more efficient than its present state, and we plan to integrate it with our Checkout form for a superior user experience. We still have that collection of initial concepts that we came up with during our brainstorming session 🙈Perhaps another hackathon would be a good idea 😂

Source: https://engineering.razorpay.com/behind-closed-doors-discount-whisperer-4d2331b5747a?source=rss------fintech-5