Groupon Merchant

Groupon is the marketplace that connects local businesses with customers through deals. On the merchant side of the business, Groupon was moving from a sales-led model, where a rep set up every deal, toward self-serve tools that let a business create and run deals on its own. This work predates the studio: Flowform’s founder was a Product Designer on those merchant-facing products in the Palo Alto office from mid 2014 to the end of 2015.

Product Designer on the merchant team, partnering daily with product and engineering to ship cross-platform experiences and continuous improvements to internal operational tools.

Self-serve only works if a merchant can get through it alone. The sales-led intake was slow and expensive, and the early self-serve flows lost people along the way. The clearest example was the Select Discount step in Deal Builder: research by the Groupon team showed merchants were confused and felt uninformed when choosing a discount, and many dropped off right there. The business goal was to increase the number of deals created while keeping discount levels where they needed to be.

Redesigned merchant onboarding for the Self-Service Deal Creation Tool, replacing the sales-led intake with a self-serve path a merchant could complete unaided.

For the Select Discount step, designed a flexible, playful widget: the merchant slides across a range to set the discount, with a marked sweet spot in green and a smiley showing the optimal zone, and all the financial information for that choice in one place, easy to read. Merchants were guided toward the recommended percentage instead of guessing. The widget was tested with merchants using a prototype; they found it playful and said it clearly communicated what mattered.

Designed Merchant Pages, and the UI, UX, and visual design of Groupon To Go, the food delivery and takeout service introduced in 2015, including the tablet app on iOS and Android that restaurants used to accept or decline incoming orders. Alongside these, shipped ongoing usability improvements to the internal tools operations teams used every day.

The self-serve onboarding reduced drop-off, significantly increased merchant sign-ups, and freed up sales operations. The Select Discount redesign increased conversion by six percentage points while holding discount levels steady. Merchant Pages and Groupon To Go extended Groupon’s footprint into B2B and on-demand.