In this week’s interview, we talk next generation payments with Nick Smotek, Director, Omni Digital Technology and User Experience at Deckers Brands.
August 3, 2018
Can you tell me a little about your role?
I’m the Director of Digital Technology and User Experience at Deckers. We have five shoe brands and over twenty websites across the globe. My job is primarily focused on bringing innovation and new technology to our global systems and improving the user experience in most of our North America operations.
So, what are you working on right now?
Right now, we are developing a brand-new payment method, where the customer gets instant gratification in receiving the product right away, but pays in four installments, similar to layaway. This caught my eye earlier in the year and then we noticed Amazon launched a similar initiative I knew this was going to be the next generation of payments. It’s good for a company like ours that has higher price point and is starting to target a millennial audience; consumers that don’t currently own credit cards and don’t want to. Credit is taboo for this generation or they simply have not established credit yet. We do see that a large proportion of our consumers are already using credit within our PayPal system, so we wanted to find a solution that expands our reach. Overall, we want to target consumers who are not comfortable with credit in a new way. It’s great being able to offer a $100 item for $25 upfront. We believe this will improve conversion and average order value and be the tipping point for a lot of consumers. Plus these vendors take on all fraud risk and chargebacks.
How much overall resource are you putting into this? And how is it being integrated into your team’s way of thinking?
We are spending a good amount of time on this at the moment, as this project spans multiple teams and multiple systems. Our UX team is making sure the experience is set up in a way that is user friendly for our consumer. Our dev team is developing the front-end experience and integrating into our back-end systems. Our biggest hurdle will be with our finance team who has to ensure all our settlements are done correctly. It’s an undertaking with multiple stakeholders.
What advice can you give to anyone starting a project like this? What are the first steps?
Find a good vendor that meets all of the business requirements. Make sure all parties who could impact your timeline are involved in the vendor selection from the beginning. Whoever you partner with, you will want to make sure they match your brand demographic, and that their network of other brands has a similar customer demographic to your own. The vendor pool for this is quite small; we’ve narrowed it down from three potential partners to one over the past few weeks. When selecting a vendor understand right now, these types of venders our really looking to grow their market share and are willing to negotiate on pricing for fees. Our goal was a very streamlined experience that was simple and easy for the consumer to use that had a strong userbase already that we could tap into.
What stage are you at in the project?
At the moment we are in requirements phase and working on the design of the experience. Once we understand the requirements we will be able to move fast on the development. Our goal right now is to ensure our finance team is comfortable with all the requirements, so once we have crossed all our T’s and dotted all our I’s we will be able to start our development sprints. We’re aiming for a go live date at the end of September 2018.
If you could start this project again, would you change your approach?
So far, it’s run smoothly because all our teams believe this will be a positive change and conversion driver. We did get a late start on this due to conflicting priorities. I would have liked to have started it a bit sooner, so that we would already have it live and could be running tests on the user experience. The clock is ticking for us to get this launched. So, if you’re thinking of doing this, my advice is to start sooner rather than later!
In this week’s interview, we talk next generation payments with Nick Smotek, Director, Omni Digital Technology and User Experience at Deckers Brands.
August 3, 2018
Can you tell me a little about your role?
I’m the Director of Digital Technology and User Experience at Deckers. We have five shoe brands and over twenty websites across the globe. My job is primarily focused on bringing innovation and new technology to our global systems and improving the user experience in most of our North America operations.
So, what are you working on right now?
Right now, we are developing a brand-new payment method, where the customer gets instant gratification in receiving the product right away, but pays in four installments, similar to layaway. This caught my eye earlier in the year and then we noticed Amazon launched a similar initiative I knew this was going to be the next generation of payments. It’s good for a company like ours that has higher price point and is starting to target a millennial audience; consumers that don’t currently own credit cards and don’t want to. Credit is taboo for this generation or they simply have not established credit yet. We do see that a large proportion of our consumers are already using credit within our PayPal system, so we wanted to find a solution that expands our reach. Overall, we want to target consumers who are not comfortable with credit in a new way. It’s great being able to offer a $100 item for $25 upfront. We believe this will improve conversion and average order value and be the tipping point for a lot of consumers. Plus these vendors take on all fraud risk and chargebacks.
How much overall resource are you putting into this? And how is it being integrated into your team’s way of thinking?
We are spending a good amount of time on this at the moment, as this project spans multiple teams and multiple systems. Our UX team is making sure the experience is set up in a way that is user friendly for our consumer. Our dev team is developing the front-end experience and integrating into our back-end systems. Our biggest hurdle will be with our finance team who has to ensure all our settlements are done correctly. It’s an undertaking with multiple stakeholders.
What advice can you give to anyone starting a project like this? What are the first steps?
Find a good vendor that meets all of the business requirements. Make sure all parties who could impact your timeline are involved in the vendor selection from the beginning. Whoever you partner with, you will want to make sure they match your brand demographic, and that their network of other brands has a similar customer demographic to your own. The vendor pool for this is quite small; we’ve narrowed it down from three potential partners to one over the past few weeks. When selecting a vendor understand right now, these types of venders our really looking to grow their market share and are willing to negotiate on pricing for fees. Our goal was a very streamlined experience that was simple and easy for the consumer to use that had a strong userbase already that we could tap into.
What stage are you at in the project?
At the moment we are in requirements phase and working on the design of the experience. Once we understand the requirements we will be able to move fast on the development. Our goal right now is to ensure our finance team is comfortable with all the requirements, so once we have crossed all our T’s and dotted all our I’s we will be able to start our development sprints. We’re aiming for a go live date at the end of September 2018.
If you could start this project again, would you change your approach?
So far, it’s run smoothly because all our teams believe this will be a positive change and conversion driver. We did get a late start on this due to conflicting priorities. I would have liked to have started it a bit sooner, so that we would already have it live and could be running tests on the user experience. The clock is ticking for us to get this launched. So, if you’re thinking of doing this, my advice is to start sooner rather than later!