Rebates : Instant Point Back

Product Designer (UI/UX) & Product Manager

Overview

Rakuten Rebates is a Point Back platform in Japan that rewards users with Rakuten Points when they shop online through affiliated stores. Unlike Rakuten Rewards (U.S.), which offers cash back, Rebates integrates into the broader Rakuten ecosystem, allowing users to accumulate points they can redeem across various Rakuten services.

This project aimed to improve the feedback loop about point earning in order to reduce “where is my point back” claims.

Problem

The highest inquiry reported to the Customer Service team is the “Where is my point back” form. This issue is also highlighted in App reviews with lower ratings of 1 to 3 stars. The core of this issue is in the Rebates backend code that controls how and when Rakuten Points are awarded to a user’s account. Due to technical difficulties, this process can take up to 2 months, which is too long of a wait and tends to feel like a bait and switch to most new members trying the service for the first time.

What is “Where is my point back”?

Hypothesis

If we know the purchase made, the store where it was made, and the amount spent, we can predict the estimated reward before the merchant sends a confirmation.

If this prediction can be made accurately and promptly, we can boost trust in that the service works, and reduce the number of “Where is my point back” inquiries dramatically.

ANA estimates 2 months to report on successful purchases.

Adidas estimates 7 days to report on successful purchases.

Initial Proposal

Phase 1

Use the in-app browser to detect purchases made by scraping the code for check-out screens and identifying a successful and eligible purchase.

We have over 900 different stores. It will cost us high dev resources to cover all stores.

Once I started looking into the data and performance of merchants, I discovered that over 75% of all purchases made are made from our top 50 merchants.

With this data backing my proposal, I split the project into multiple phases to ramp up the number of supported merchants by 5, 10, 20 and up to 50.

At this stage, there were not user facing changes yet.

I worked with our BI team to set up a flag if any of our scripts failed or reported a value that was different from the Point Reward officially granted by the merchant later in the process.

Phase 2

For the second phase, I started to roll out user facing improvements such as:

  • A confirmation email once a purchase was detected

  • Better messaging in My Account

  • Improving the “Where is my point back” inquiry form to include educational content about points

Old Monthly Email

New Monthly Email

Order Detected Email

Confirmation Email

Unexpected Issue

Since the experience was not is not consistent across all stores, users who purchased at a non-supported merchant’s website assumed there is an issue when they did not receive an order detected email.

While we saw that “where is my point back” inquiries were steadily decreasing, we decided this is an issue we can handle case by case as we continue to ramp up the stores.

Phase 3

While we tied to focus on App first design, the data showed that we still had a significant number of shoppers on web.

However, on web, we lose track of a user after they click an affiliate link, making it impossible for us to know if the user has made a purchase or not.

To over come this obstacle, I negotiated with the Rebates extension team to introduce this feature to allow us to bring this experience to our web users.

The chrome extension is build and managed by a separate dev team from the one I normally work with. Though our conversations, I learned that their main KPI is new user adoption. So i proposed we advertise this feature as a perk for downloading the extension.

“Get instant point back reports when you use our Rebates extension!”

This idea got them on board 👍🏻

Old Logged-out PC Experience

New Logged-out PC Experience