AnyPay

Please click here to review the slide deck.

Problem Statement  

How might we improve the gift card experience so users can spend the full value and also use them when the purchase total exceeds the value?

Problem Background  

Consumers have been purchasing and receiving physical and digital gift cards for decades. Usually, physical gift cards can be used both in stores and online, but unfortunately consumers are not always able to use them when needed, especially when attempting to use them online. 

Store-specific gift cards normally work when applying the value via the applicable store’s website or app. Unfortunately, if you are using one of the universal gift cards (i.e., Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover) you may not be successful with applying your gift card balance for your purchase. For example, if your purchase total exceeds the value on the gift card, there is a strong possibility that you will not be able to apply the gift card toward your purchase because most retail websites do not allow shoppers to use more than one payment method for a transaction. Customers also find it difficult to use all of the funds available on their gift cards. Our goal at AnyPay is to solve these pain points for customers.

Our customers are shoppers who use gift cards or digital payments and are open to using a payment service app. We should address this problem now because consumers have had difficulties using gift cards in certain circumstances for years and there has been no viable solution to improve this process for users. Comments/Posts found on customer forums  and responses from some survey participants have confirmed that these are problems.

Research Insights

User Pain Points

After reading consumer posts on Quora and conducting over 30 qualitative surveys, we identified the following gift card pain points that we could aim to solve.

• Inability to use the full value
• Having to keep up with them/misplacing them
• Only able to use when satisfies full purchase total

Our research has shown that people have come up with workarounds to circumvent these issues, but that no real solution has been produced. There are even websites that offer to purchase gift cards like giftcardcashier.com or cashcard.com, but customers will not receive the full value of their gift cards when selling to those companies. 

Supporting Data

• 45.5% of survey respondents indicated that they are not getting the full value out of their gift cards
• 48.5% of respondents have something that they dislike about the process of using gift cards
• Integrating gift cards with a digital wallet was the most mentioned improvement
  
  

Click here to see the research synthesis & here to see the video overview.

Please click on the link below to watch Clark Howard’s response to the following question…

How Do I Use All the Funds on My Virtual Gift Card?

https://youtu.be/RaN-Foh4FHU?si=lhRZZcqs18VgkpAr

Current workaround discovered during research (found on giftcards.com):

• Customers can go to the website where they want to buy merchandise and use their Visa (or other universal gift card) to purchase an e-gift card with that particular merchant and then apply the newly purchased e-gift card toward their purchase amount.

Though the workaround could work, it is not efficient nor is it a good use of customer time. When electronic gift cards are purchased, they are typically emailed to the recipient selected and the time that it takes to be delivered via email varies from company to company. It could take minutes, hours, or even a day to receive the e-gift card.

Feedback

Our preliminary user research to validate this problem with gift card users found that people are looking for ways to easily spend the full value and apply universal gift cards to purchases when they do not satisfy the purchase total.

Landing on the Solution

Based on our target users’ pain points, we knew we wanted to work on the following features…

• The ability to add gift cards to our digital payment app
• The ability to apply multiple payment methods to a single transaction

Future Steps

As a result of communicating with users, these are the additional features we would like to add in the future…

• The ability to scan your cards to populate the number (debit, credit & gift)
• Visibility of gift card balances

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