Payment Method Discoverability - Amazon
Payment Method Discovery Across the Shopping Journey
Improving Payment Discoverability in Amazon
Customers on Amazon MENA were unable to discover flexible payment options until the final checkout step — far too late to influence purchase decisions. Despite the Middle East and North Africa being one of the fastest-growing markets for instalment payments, these options were surfaced only after purchase intent had already been formed — or lost — without providing the affordability context users needed.
To address this, the Instalment & Payment Discovery initiative was launched to redesign how payment methods — especially instalments and bank-linked offers — are surfaced across key decision points such as Search, Product Detail Page (PDP), and Cart. The focus was not just on visibility, but on delivering contextual, personalised, and timely payment cues throughout the journey.
Opportunity
The MENA region is a uniquely high-opportunity market for payment innovation. Instalment adoption in the UAE alone grew 65% year-on-year through 2023–24, with providers like Tabby and Tamara acquiring millions of users. Yet Amazon's payment discovery experience had not kept pace with this behavioural shift.
The data told a clear story: customers who encountered instalment options before checkout were 2.4× more likely to complete a purchase using them. The challenge wasn't building a better checkout — it was redesigning discoverability for the entire pre-checkout journey.
Five Customer Pain Points Driving the Initiative
Through session recordings, funnel analysis, and 22 in-depth user interviews across UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, five structural pain points emerged — each compounding the others and collectively suppressing instalment adoption across the platform.
Search Results: Hard-to-Discover Payment Benefits
The Search Results Page is where purchase intent begins — yet it provided zero payment signals. Users browsing Apple Watch, iPhone, or high-value electronics had no way to filter, identify, or anticipate which products had instalment options. Payment was invisible until the very end.
- No instalment signal on search result cards
- Eligible and ineligible products indistinguishable
- Price-sensitive shoppers had no filter anchor
- Customer prefers 0% interest & shorter tenures — but couldn't identify them
- Same payment experience for every customer profile
- Previously used payment methods not surfaced
- No logic-based ranking of payment offers
- High-ASP customers not identified and served differently
- Instalments at search level can increase click-through by 18–22%
- Monthly payment framing reduces price anchoring friction
- Instalment filter chip unavailable — a known conversion driver
Discovery Project — Search Results: Hard-to-Discover Payment Benefits
PDP: Hard-to-Discover Payment Methods & Savings
The Product Detail Page is the highest-intent moment in the shopping journey — where customers make the final go/no-go decision. Yet the existing PDP offered no instalment visibility, limited bank discount surfacing, and no affordability framing. Three distinct pain points converged here.
Discovery Project — PDP: Hard-to-Discover Payment Methods & Savings
High Upsell Cart (HUC): No Visibility for Reachable Offers & Instalments
The Add-to-Cart confirmation moment — the HUC (High Upsell Cart) — was another missed opportunity. After a user tapped "Add to Cart," the confirmation drawer contained zero payment signals, and no basket-building prompt to help customers reach offer thresholds.
Research showed this moment is high-receptivity: customers have just committed to a product and are briefly in a consideration mode before returning to browse. It's the ideal moment to surface a "spend AED 50 more to unlock 15% off with HSBC" or "eligible for 0% instalments with Tabby" message.
Discovery Project — High Upsell Cart (HUC): No Visibility for Reachable Offers & Instalments
View Cart: Payment Methods & Instalments Blindness
The View Cart page was the last upstream touchpoint before checkout — a high-intent moment with no payment context. Customers with a cart of AED 1,200 had no idea they could split it, no visibility of linked bank offers, and no incentive to add more items to unlock threshold-based benefits.
- No instalment offer discoverability at cart level — despite this being the last decision point
- Basket-building logic absent: customers didn't know "add AED 50 to unlock Tabby instalments"
- Bank card offers (e.g., save AED 5 with Al Hilal) not surfaced until checkout — too late to influence the cart
- No combined view of savings across coupon, bank discount, and instalment plans — each appeared in different UI zones
"I had no idea I could pay in four. I just saw the total and thought — that's a lot. If it said I could pay AED 237 today, I would have done it right there."
Discovery Project — View Cart: Payment Methods & Instalments Blindness
Design Approach
This was not a simple "show more information" project. It required a new design logic — one that knew when to show payment options, which options to prioritise for each customer, and how to present them without disrupting the primary shopping intent.
We defined three design principles that governed every decision across the project.
From Pain Points to a Shipped, Multi-Touchpoint System
Six months of cross-functional design work, spanning Amazon MENA product, payments, legal, and three external instalment partners.
Cross-functional kickoff with Amazon MENA Product, Payments, instalment partners (Tabby, Tamara), bank partners (Al Hilal, HSBC, ENBD), and legal. Mapped the current-state experience across 14 touchpoints. Defined project success metrics and a shared design decision framework across all workstreams.
I conducted 22 moderated user interviews across UAE, KSA, and Egypt, combined with funnel analysis across 450K+ sessions to identify exact drop-off points. Eye-tracking studies on PDP confirmed that 80%+ of users never scroll below the Add to Cart button — validating my above-fold placement strategy.
I designed 3–4 layout variants per touchpoint — testing copy approaches (monthly framing vs partner branding), placement logic (inline vs overlay), and progressive disclosure depth. I ran rapid async reviews with all partners via Figma prototypes shared in weekly review cadences.
I worked with the personalisation engineering team to define the ranking logic that powers personalised payment surfacing. I designed the priority ranking ruleset: affordability options with the lowest monthly payment → methods with linked offers and savings → recently used methods → co-branded credit card onboarding. I defined 12 edge cases including ineligible products, cart thresholds, and failed authorisations.
I led multiple rounds of cross-functional reviews with partner teams including Tabby, Tamara, and bank stakeholders to ensure full compliance with legal and brand guidelines. I resolved key constraints related to logo usage, interest disclosures, eligibility messaging, and co-branding hierarchy. I established and maintained a centralized compliance tracker, driving closure of 140+ annotations and ensuring timely alignment for launch readiness.
I led a six-week A/B testing phase across three cohorts in UAE. I prepared the final handoff with annotated Figma specs, interaction documentation, and a component library extending the Amazon MENA design system. We shipped across Search, PDP, View Cart, and Add-to-Cart Confirmation simultaneously to ensure journey consistency. Full product experience sign-off was obtained prior to launch.
Solutions
Following the four-touchpoint pain-point analysis, we designed a connected payment discovery system that threads instalments and bank offers through the entire upstream shopping journey — Search, PDP, HUC, and View Cart.
Each solution was built on the same three principles defined in the design approach: progressive disclosure, personalised payment ranking, and zero primary-flow disruption. Together they shift payment from a checkout-only mechanic into a discovery-stage conversion lever.
Search Results — Instalment & Payment Discovery
Redesigned the Search Results experience to surface instalment context directly on product cards, shifting instalments from a checkout-only feature to an early-stage decision driver. Integrated the payment discovery system with the personalisation engine's logic-based discovery to ensure the right payment signal is surfaced to the right customer at the right moment, improving relevance and conversion.
- Enhanced Payment Discovery & Promotion Integration — Consolidated instalment amounts, coupon savings, and bank offers into a single, clear value proposition for eligible products
- "Instalments Available" Filter — Enabled customers to quickly refine results based on instalment eligibility, improving navigation for price-sensitive users
- Logic-Based Personalisation — Leveraged Pinnacle Prime logic to dynamically surface the most relevant payment partner (e.g., Tabby for 0% intent, Emirates NBD for card-linked users)
- Discoverability & Ranking Impact — Improved visibility and ranking of eligible products based on quality of payment signals, driving higher engagement
Discovery Project — Search Results: Instalment & Payment Discovery
PDP — Offers & Instalment Discovery
The PDP solution introduced a structured "Offers for you" row — a scannable, above-fold section surfacing the two most relevant payment offers per customer, with a "See all offers" link for deeper exploration. Crucially, combined savings (instalment + coupon + bank discount) were shown together for the first time.
Discovery Project — PDP: Instalment & Payment Discovery
View Cart — Payment & Instalment Discovery
The View Cart redesign transformed a passive summary screen into an active affordability tool. Customers now see a persistent basket-building prompt ("Add AED 50 to unlock instalments"), a linked bank offer row, and an instalment plan card — all before they reach checkout.
- Personalised payment suggestions based on cart value, customer profile, and behaviour history
- SMX ranking logic powers the primary offer shown
- Persistent instalment card showing total, monthly amount, and available partners
- Plan selector (4–12 months) accessible inline without leaving the cart
- "Add AED 50 to unlock 15% off with Al Hilal" — threshold prompt drives higher AOV
- Progress indicator shows how close the customer is to the next tier
Discovery Project — View Cart: Instalment & Payment Discovery
Prototype Walkthrough
An interactive prototype built for leadership alignment — demonstrating the end-to-end instalment discoverability experience across Search, PDP, and Checkout.
Projected Impact — Validated Through User Research
The redesign has not yet launched. Instead of post-launch metrics, the projections below come from a structured pre-launch research programme: 22 moderated usability sessions across UAE, KSA and Egypt, task-based prototype testing, funnel analysis across 450K+ historical sessions, and intent-to-use benchmarking against comparable instalment markets. Each figure reflects observed behaviour inside the prototype or modelled outcomes from research signals.
Pre-launch · Figures drawn from moderated usability sessions, prototype preference testing and historical funnel analysis. Live post-launch measurement is planned once rollout begins.
Projected Gains in Order Value & Re-engagement
Research signals pointed to strong secondary effects beyond adoption. In prototype sessions where basket-building prompts were active, participants trended toward an Average Order Value (AOV) roughly 2.1× the platform baseline, adding an average of 1.4 additional items after engaging with the instalment offer row.
A separate re-engagement study with customers who had previously abandoned instalment flows showed a 3.1× higher stated likelihood of returning and completing a purchase once affordability was made visible earlier in the journey — suggesting earlier drop-offs were driven by visibility and trust, not one-time friction.
