FLASHPAY: Lightning Fast Payments

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Building Fynd

5 min readJan 14, 2016

Two months ago we took up a challenge to optimise our payment process for mobile hyperlocal such that it resonates with our core product offering — Superfast Delivery! Our super-fast delivery network ensures that your order gets delivered within a few hours. Yes, within a few hours and at a time that is convenient to you.

With this in mind, we code named the project “Zoopay” and set out looking for inspiration from some really well designed apps like Zomato, BookMyShow, Uber, and Cleartrip.

We noticed that while the entire process was seamless, the checkout process was usually 6–8 steps long and redundant. We thought we could do better.

We wanted the entire process to take no more than 30 seconds.

And after tons of research and design iterations we think we’ve built the fastest checkout system around.

Today, we are thrilled to announce

our new seamless payment feature that we have been working on for a long time, trying to get it just right.

Why is it the fastest?! Checkout our app and you will know 😉
Download here.

For the lazier one’s like us, here’s what buying a product on Fynd looks like now…

While this is what it looked like earlier

Yes, you would have to go through 5 steps to make a purchase. Our goal was to bring it down to two. Sounds crazy, but yeah!

When we started designing we thought we can pull this off in a month. Little did we know about the mountains of design and engineering challenges that we were going to face. We went through a zillion iterations — redefining what the Bag should look like, making sure the UX remains consistent across iOS and Android, and adding too many ambitious features only to realise we couldn’t accommodate them in our timeline — before we narrowed down on the current version. Unsure whether we should break away from the 5 step stereotype we gathered some feedback on our prototypes, made some required changes, and got started.

The only way to reduce number of steps was to bring all user details on the Bag. Think of it like a store — you take the items you want to purchase to the Point of Sale and hand over your credit card to the cashier. It’s very likely that you have your preferred mode of payment — by card or cash, and we have observed that this remains consistent. With this in mind we started experimenting on the Bag with two challenges, however. One, how do we ensure that our UI does not look too cluttered with so many details. Two, how do we make users select a time convenient to them to receive delivery. Latter is important to highlight since we deliver products within 2–4 hours on the same day and is one of our core offerings.

Additionally, in terms of engineering, bringing all details on Bag was the most challenging. On every Bag request we’d have to check whether the items were in stock, if the price of any item had changed, allocate the nearest store from which the item can be fulfilled, fetching user’s payment details and delivery address, calculating discounts etc. The API calls that we distributed across 5 screens earlier now had to be done on a single screen while ensuring that the response time is within 200 ms. We made tweaks and were able to bring down the API calls to 2 from 5 along with a 60% improvement in response time.

Here are some sketches from our initial Bag experiments…

A few from our time selection experiments…

Ideas around “Add Card” feature…

This is when we started getting excited about the possibilities and realised our new payment feature needs an identity. The name should reflect it’s purpose and at the same time should have a strong call to action. Unable to find a strong and catchy name within the team — we ran a company wide crowd sourcing contest with a grand prize of INR 6,000 (oh! we have such contests every month, btw). After much consideration, we finally zeroed in on FLASHPAY. The hardest part then was to design a logo. We HAD to get it right. We knew we wanted to play around “Flash” and “Money” for it to go well with the name.

We made some initial designs…