Stache had plenty of people willing to host their space for storage on our platform, but we were struggling with getting renters to complete bookings.
We were getting lots of traffic from potential renters, but we weren’t getting any bookings! We had a conversion problem. I checked with the marketing team to see if the traffic we were getting was indeed from people in the cities where we launched and that these people were actively looking for storage – yes, and yes. The target was right. This meant it was time for me to take a hard look at the product.
The other important piece of information I learned from the marketing team was about our users’ devices.
>90% of traffic to our booking flow was from mobile web.
The previous designer had designed the booking flow for a desktop browser, not mobile web. This was the old/pre-existing design:
My next steps were to take a hard look at the product through site analytics and user interviews/surveys. I identified four main problems and outlined potential solutions:
We looked at the page analytics to try to find out where we were losing users. We noticed that the majority of users stopped at the step where they had to add their exact address. However, we don’t need the user’s exact address for them to be able to make a booking. We just need their zip code so that we can give them a price (price is based on area).
In the booking flow, let’s just ask users for their zip code. We can get their exact address (to pick up their stuff and handle moving) after the booking is complete.
The marketplace option is confusing and unnecessary. Since the beginning of Stache, we’ve offered a marketplace option, where potential renters enter our platform and can search among all the storage options in their area and choose which one to book, similar to how you'd book a place on Airbnb. However, unlike an Airbnb trip, storage is not an experience, and I hypothesized that users don’t actually care enough about the details of the storage space to make the effort of choosing among an overwhelming amount of options. User interviews confirmed this hypothesis that users don’t care that much about where their items are stored, as long as they're safe. Forcing users to choose a space in a marketplace is just another barrier to booking.
Let’s remove the “search marketplace” option and try a simpler booking flow where users enter the minimum information necessary – zip code, size of storage space, and the date that they need storage space – to book storage. We’ll match them with a host on the backend.
Users might not know the “end date” of their storage needs. Again, since the beginning of Stache, we’d ask users for a start and end date for their storage booking, as if it were an Airbnb trip. However, once again, storage is not the same as traveling and a user might not know how long they need storage for.
Let’s offer users the option for “indefinite” storage, where we charge them monthly until they decide to end their booking.
I implemented these solutions and redesigned the mobile web experience of booking storage to become a single page checkout flow where we collect the minimum information necessary to complete a booking:
In our target market in Tennessee, we started to get bookings and increased our conversion rate by the end of the week.
