Shopping Made Fun — Onboarding with Wish

Wish is the flagship product of a company called ContextLogic. Wish has taken the approach of Walmart by targeting value-conscious consumers. They do this by allowing consumers to buy low-priced goods directly from the factories and distributors at the top of the supply chain. Cut out the middle man and you cut costs — it’s as simple as that.

All signs point to this strategy working, too. They’ve raised over $1b and are valued at somewhere between $3.5b and $5b (source) and as of March 2016 they had hundreds of millions of users and GMV (gross merchandise volume) in the billions (source).

Having used the app before, I find that it’s essentially a fun and visual wrapper on Alibaba Express. Behind the scenes, though, I’m sure they put a lot of effort into ranking and relevance to make the products I see in my feed as interesting as possible while also working hard on quality assurance to remove bad suppliers.

I decided to sign up again because it’s been a while since I registered for the app and I wanted to see the onboarding process. At time of writing, Wish is #8 overall for Android, #19 overall for iOS, and #1 for both in the shopping category, so I’m sure they’re doing something right.

Let’s get started!

Onboarding Teardown

First App Load

The sign up screen is simple and effective. The name of the app and the value proposition are stated upfront, the primary and secondary CTAs use color, position, and size to clearly disambiguate between them, and even the background image reinforces what the app does. Make no mistake, once I sign up I expect to shop for products.

However, I’m left wondering whether this app sells anything other than electronics and fashion-related products. From using the app, I know they also have a large selection of household goods, pet products, makeup, and more. If I were them, I’d consider testing some different background images that speak to this product diversity. Lastly, “Create Account” seems so mundane and administrative. This immediately after I was promised an experience that makes shopping fun! I would test language that reinforces this value proposition, e.g. “Start Shopping”, “Discover Products”, or something similar.

Create Account

The account creation process is visually basic and lacks some pretty fundamental guardrails like validation, but does its job.

One annoyance was that my email was rejected only after submit based on the domain (mailinator) even though this could have been handled inline. There don’t seem to be password strength requirements considering they aren’t communicated anywhere nor is there inline validation. This is reinforced by the fact that I was able to sign up with an all lowercase 4 letter long dictionary word.

My same feedback from the last screen stands for the “Create Account” CTA in that I think this could be used to strengthen the value proposition using language like “Start Shopping”. Lastly, the Facebook and Google oauth CTAs have abandoned the standard button design that drives clarity with language around “Sign in with”, “Sign up with”, “Log in with”, etc. As it stands now, I could guess that these are Facebook and Google registration buttons but it isn’t abundantly clear and I’m not sure if my mom could guess the same.

Free Gift

Once I’ve created an account, Wish does a good job at building a personal connection and making me feel valued while simultaneously reinforcing the core product mechanism of a shoppable feed I’ve yet to experience.

The personal connection is built by addressing me by name (my uninspired name of “User”) and offering me a free gift as a “token of our appreciation”. I could feel the consumer psychology at work as a smile gripped my face and I began to take a look at the free gifts I could claim. Some fun colored cooking widgets, a USA watch, and more possibilities are just one tap away from me!

This free gift process is also effective at introducing me to the Wish interface. I see 4 products that focus on just the product image, the original price, the discounted price, and a button to claim the gift. The second row of products have no “Claim Gift” button which indicates that the button is cut off and thus I can scroll, making this not just 4 products but a feed of products.

I’m given the option to skip the free gift, which seems crazy to me at this point. Why would I say no to a free product? Cynical Frank is left thinking that this is too good to be true, but other than that I feel like this is a very effective screen.

Shipping Info

Once I claim the cool little pot lid lifts, it’s time to get them shipped!

The shipping screen starts out strong by maintaining my ability to skip the free gift, explicitly calling my selection “your gift” so that I have a sense of ownership over the item already, and displaying the product image, original price, and discounted price for a sense of continuity.

One thing I’d like to see done more on mobile is pre-filling of state and city fields by putting the zip code field immediately after country. Filling out forms on mobile can be annoying, so any barrier reduction is welcome.

Lastly, I understand why I need to give my address to get a product shipped but I’m less comfortable giving my phone number. Having an info icon I could tap to tell me why my phone number is required could be useful.

Billing Info

After clicking next on the shipping info screen, I wind up on a billing screen and thus begins my feeling of being bait and switched.

This screen does do a few things well, however. The continuity of my gift appearing at the top keeps context across the entire flow. I’m given the option to back out of the process at any point using the “No Thanks” link. And despite entering my shipping address on the previous screen, I’m given the option to use the same address as my billing address which then saves me from having to type it all over again.

The payment option toggle between credit card and PayPal wasn’t easily noticeable. In fact, I didn’t notice it until looking at the screenshots. The UI elements just didn’t jump out at me as a choice, for whatever reason. As I went to type my credit card info, I was left wishing for a camera integration that could prefill the fields for me. As mentioned a few times, anything that can be done to lessen the need for me to manually type into a bunch of fields is a big win.

The biggest issue on this screen for me is the price change. $1 isn’t a lot of money, to be clear, but it’s just not what I’ve been promised on the past 2 screens. To keep saying “Free! Free! Free!” and then at the last second tell me “Just kidding, but it’s only $1!” tells me that the product is willing to be flexible with the truth to drive conversion rates. What will happen when I buy a product that says 14 day shipping but it takes 28 days? Will they tell me to suck it up because at least it arrived? Or what about when a product says 100% cotton but it arrives and is only 90% cotton? Will I be told that cotton is still the most dominant material so it’s OK? I get it, this is a shopping app and they’ve found that getting credit card info ASAP is core to being able to drive impulse purchases later, but it just rubs be the wrong way.

I’m going to skip the gift because I feel a bit misled.

Skipping the Gift

I’ve chosen to skip the gift, and this screen is pretty clear. The CTAs are obvious and all of the messaging makes it clear that I will no longer be able to get the gift if I abandon it now.

I have chosen to abandon the gift, so onward in the process!

Update Profile

After skipping my gift, I’m asked to tell Wish a little bit about myself so that they can help find the products I’ll love.

The only two things I’m asked about, though, are my birthday and gender. Even more strange is that my birthday defaults to the date of signup 19 years ago and gender defaults to male. I wonder how many Wish users are men that were born exactly 19 years before their sign up date according to Wish’s user database 🤔. The reasons that this is a bad flow are numerous:

• Why is “Male” the default gender in 2017? Just leave it blank. Even if you’re currently signing up more men than women, eventually the makeup of the service will need to reflect the general makeup of society to continue growing and thus this default will be just flipping a coin.
• “Male” and “Female” aren’t exactly the most progressive set of gender options. What about people who don’t identify with these two options?
• The chance of my birthday being today 19 years ago is so slim that it doesn’t seem valuable. Could it really add comprehension to default to a random date instead of just leaving the fields blank?
• This flow has the potential to generate a lot of garbage data. I would specifically be interested in how many people are “born” on the exact mm//dd/yyyy as the day they signed up -19 years and how many people are “born” on the same mm/dd as the day they signed up but spun the year to a different year than -19 years.

The one thing I was expecting from this screen doesn’t appear, though. If this is a shopping app that makes shopping fun and drives product discovery, it could be pretty helpful to bootstrap that discovery engine with me saying what types of products or verticals I’m interested in. That’s not personal data and I’d be perfectly willing to contribute that data to make my experience better.

First Feed Load

I’m finally in the app and ready to have fun shopping!

The first two things I notice are that I have a badge on the shopping cart that I need to check out and the hourly deals. I’ll check out the shopping cart in the next screen.

The hourly deals are very prominent, but I’m left wondering how great of deals they really are. -42% and -88% aren’t outside of the norm when looking at the other products in the app where deeply discounted products are quite common. And there is no indication of what the normal Wish discount is for these products when they’re not on an hourly deal, so I’m not sure if this is just a visual element to drive sales or if prices are indeed cheaper.

Similarly, there are other issues with comprehension. What is that random orange icon in the bottom right of some of the products? What is the blue check mark? Why do some products not have the social proof statement of “X bought this” — are they not being purchased? And if they aren’t being purchased, why is it ranked so high in my feed? If something is almost gone, how quickly do I need to move to buy it?

Otherwise, the feed is pretty self explanatory. I can scroll and see more products as I was expecting.

I’m still wondering if the last screen to update my profile could have created a much better first feed load by asking about my interests instead of my birthday and gender. I suspect that given my interests Wish would have had a much better product to show me than the filing cabinet.

Shopping Cart Badge

When I click the shopping cart badge, I’m taken to my cart and the continuity with the previous free gift process continues. Additionally, my shipping address was saved so I don’t have to re-enter it again which I do appreciate.

One thing that jumped out at me was why the shipping was an estimated cost. Why isn’t it an actual cost given Wish has my shipping address? This is just a small nit, though.

The biggest concern of mine was that this screen reinforced my concern that Wish is flexible with the truth when it helps conversion rates. When I skipped the free gift, I was told that it was only available right now and thus I was led to believe that skipping meant no longer receiving the gift. Now I have an additional hour. This is only a minor difference, of course, but if “Free gift!” turns into “Gift for $1!” and “you can only do this right now” turns into “actually you have one more hour”, then where else will this slippery slope manifest itself in the rest of the product?

Summary

Overall, the Wish onboarding process was pretty smooth. I enjoy the app so it was fun to sign up again as a first-time user!

Pros: Wish does an excellent job at showing continuity across different screens, explicitly making the value proposition clear, and using various opportunities to increase comprehension of the app even before the user has gotten into the core experience.

Cons: On multiple occasions, I wound up feeling duped because I was told one thing but then found out something else. Additionally, I bet there are opportunities for users to contribute more data about themselves to create a more compelling first feed load.

Note: I highly suspect that Wish is not being flexible with the truth on purpose in the two examples I outline, but rather this is the result of a series of experiments that optimize towards a specific set of metrics like gift redemption rate, time to redeem gift, and accounts with card on file. However, I think that’s why it’s also important to view all experiments with a qualitative lens. If this improves gift redemption rate by X% but qualitative feedback suggests Y% of your users feel like you’re being dishonest, is that worth it? It may also be that most users wouldn’t even blink twice at the above flags I raised, at which point they can be dismissed.