Case Study: Fastlane

Problem Statement

When presented with the “Pay with PayPal” option at the time of checkout, customers with an active PayPal account would often choose not to check out with PayPal. This might be because they didn’t have the card they wanted to use saved in their PayPal wallet or because they thought that checking out with PayPal would add too many extra steps. It could even be because they couldn’t remember how to log in to their PayPal account.

Business Goal

PayPal was concerned about the number of people who chose to checkout as a guest, despite having an active PayPal account. The company also wanted to encourage more businesses to adopt its full-stack payment product, PayPal Complete Payments. PayPal decided that by creating an easier guest checkout experience, it could achieve its goals of processing more payments and moving more businesses to its most robust offering.

What We Did

The consumer-facing value props were easy to put together. With Fastlane, customers could enter their information once and check out in the future with just one click at any business that offered Fastlane.

The messaging for merchants was a bit trickier. Because Fastlane required the merchant to use PayPal Complete Payments, an existing PayPal merchant might need to upgrade their integration. And a new PayPal merchant would have to understand the benefits of choosing PayPal Complete Payments over our low-code integration.

Our hypothesis was that by making guest checkout as fast and frictionless as possible, merchants could increase their conversion rates and have fewer customers abandon their carts. But because Fastlane hadn’t launched yet, we didn’t have any numbers to back up a claim of increased conversion.

After extensive collaboration with our brand, marketing, and legal teams, we came up with language about improving the speed of checkout to help boost conversion. We developed a clear, concise message for partners like BigCommerce and Magento to convey to benefits of Fastlane to their customers.