Project Background

I helped Moneris transition from our legacy retail POS, PAYD Pro Plus (below left), to our first in-house POS solution, Moneris Go Retail (below right). On this project, I led a team of designers and researchers, collaborating heavily with our partners in product and engineering to build this product from the ground up. As the leading payment processor in Canada, Moneris empowers thousands of small businesses across the country every day - many of these being in the retail industry.

For a long time, we were supporting these businesses with basic POS functionality through our PAYD Pro Plus product. The problem we were facing was low adoption rates for the POS compared to core payment processing.

Our team wanted to bridge this gap of POS adoption, so we set out to conduct research with our merchants and find out why PAYD Pro Plus wasn’t providing a sufficient value proposition to them.

Market Research with Sales & Customer Experience

We conducted 300 customer surveys with our sales and customer experience teams, that yielded great directional insights for us. From Figure A (below): The idea that our foundational attribute as a leading payments provider was reinforced, and the same for our assumptions regarding pain points. While we have the basics down, there is work to be done regarding improving customer perceptions and value proposition.

From Figure B (below): Again we see that there is a big opportunity in building up our perception of innovation and evolving past being a “payment processor”. Our products are seen as boring and quickly losing relevance. To find out more we conducted further in-depth qualitative research with select survey respondents.

The Research said “Start From Scratch”

The more merchants we talked to, the more pain points were revealed.

Some of the key pain points included:

  • Multiple accessibility issues

  • Performance and lag issues

  • “Clunky” transaction flows

  • Limited inventory management capabilities

  • Lack of key features like promotions

After discussing these issues with our engineering and product teams, consensus was reached that we should start building this product again from scratch. It would be easier to address by taking a holistic approach and implementing a design system, than trying to piecemeal updates to this legacy platform. Leveraging the design system would also solve accessibility concerns that were apparent with the previous solution. Additionally, this opened up the opportunity to develop a webapp, so merchants could save tablet acquisition costs. Therefore, we set out to build Moneris Go Retail (below).

Main Challenges & How We Addressed Them

Maintaining back-end functionality

PAYD Pro Plus had been around for years, and throughout that time, the team had been pumping out new features to help support our merchants any way we could. Unfortunately, this led to the product becoming too bulky, to the point where we had many features that were not being used by anyone. Even worse, this was starting to create performance and lag issues.

While we wanted to maintain as much back-end functionality as we could, the team agreed that we should simplifying our product offering. We mapped out our current offering, and then mapped out what our ideal MVP solution would look like. This exercise helped us decipher what was truly important for our merchants, and allowed us to simplify the product by almost 30%.

Reimagining the transaction flow

At the core of every retail business, is the ability to conduct transactions efficiently. The PAYD Pro Plus product simply didn’t offer that. The product catalogue was hard to navigate, filters were non existent, order details weren’t clear, the list goes on.

Based on our site map exercise, we ranked everything we wanted in the transaction flow in terms of importance for merchants. We iterated and iterated, holding sessions with engineering and product teams across the org, senior leadership, and of course our merchants who would eventually be using this product. Merchants wanted more products on screen, easy search and filter functionality, clear order details and totals, and fast checkout. We were able to accommodate all of those wants into our solution.

The evolving need for new functionality

The business landscape today is much different than even 5 or 6 years ago, and our merchant demands reflect this. When asked which features are must-haves, the majority of them replied with comprehensive inventory management, and customizable pricing (e.g. discounts). Neither of these were offered in PAYD Pro Plus.

Key aspects of inventory management included being able to see all their products in one place, conduct bulk actions, and display the most important information at a glance. To expedite our research process, we took inspiration from some of our top competitors including Shopify, Square, and Lightspeed. By taking bits and pieces of each, we were able to craft our own unique offering.

For discounts, our team took a similar approach. The way discounts are configured is pretty standard across the board. To save ourselves time & resources, we decided not to re-invent the wheel and get this functionality to market faster. We offer discounts by category, product, dollar amount, percentage, over a period of time or just for one day.

Early Results

Moneris Go Retail was a hit right from launch. The product is made for small businesses, and our target merchants have been providing great feedback so far. It’s a stark difference from the previous PAYD Pro Plus product, and we were told multiple times that including their direct feedback into the new product is a testament to how we are putting merchants first.

One thing that surprised us, was that Scholastic, the premier publisher and distributor of books in the Ontario education system, contacted us about trying the product. Since they are an enterprise company, and our product is tailored for small business, we were apprehensive, but definitely welcomed the opportunity.

Their product lines were quite simple, so although it was a challenge to support multiple locations and lanes, we were able to run a successful demo event with them. Pictured below, you can see one of our demo events at a school in Toronto. We were able to onboard and train their staff in minutes, validating that our simplified onboarding flow works.

Scholastic was very impressed with the product, provided great feedback into additional improvements we could make, and eventually signed with us as our first large account.

Fostering a Culture of Curiosity & Open Collaboration

Throughout the entire process, I wanted to ensure that research & collaboration were two core tenets we followed. Our team regularly held store simulation sessions in the office, like the one pictured below. We “trained” coworkers who were just seeing the product for the first time how to navigate the POS, fulfill an order, process a refund or transaction, etc.

We had partners from engineering, product, marketing, and even senior leaders come out to these sessions. It was very insightful to see so many people interacting with the product, especially those who were brand new to the product.

The results were excellent. We fostered a culture of curiosity and open collaboration with feedback loops, which proved invaluable throughout the product design process. Even now that the product is out in the market, these sessions will continue regularly to ensure we are being true to our culture, and improving the experience for our customers.