CREATOR CHECKOUT
Creators had global audiences. Beu had a local payment experience. We built a checkout that let them get paid anywhere.
Client
BEU
Year
2022
Category
CREATOR ECONOMY
Role
Senior Product Designer / Acting PM
Beu let creators sell digital files. Their audiences were global, but payments went through one local provider that only settled in Colombian pesos.
Creators kept asking for the same things: tips, letting buyers choose the price, buyer messages and more than one currency. Many gave up and pasted external payment links into their Beu pages, and we lost both revenue and trust.
Senior Product Designer and Acting PM. I sized the opportunity with the CPO, wrote the PRD, and designed the checkout. I also ran two build streams with Engineering: provider integrations and an operations backoffice.
The problem wasn't the checkout screen. It was everything behind it.
Our single provider rejected about 60% of attempted charges and charged fees well above market. There was no real way to handle disputes, and reconciliation was done by hand.
Any checkout we designed on top of that would still fail at the moment of payment.
/// 4 DECISIONS
01 — Build our own checkout instead of relying on external links.
Why: External links were taking revenue and the buyer relationship out of Beu.
Trade-off: Payments became our problem: providers, disputes and reconciliation included.
Result: Creators stopped using external links and moved to our checkout.
02 — Mobile-first, because 95% of purchases were mobile.
Why: The data made the choice for us.
Trade-off: Desktop got an adapted layout, not its own design.
Result: We tested two mobile flows in Maze. Both worked, and we picked the one high-volume creators could set up fastest.
03 — Several payment providers instead of betting on one.
Why: One provider meant one point of failure, one currency and ~60% rejections.
Trade-off: More integrations, routing and retry logic to maintain, and a slower rollout country by country.
Result: Rejections dropped from ~60% to ~5%.
04 — Build operations tools, because a simple checkout needs complexity behind it.
Why: Disputes were unmanageable, and support depended on Engineering to fix anything.
Trade-off: A second workstream that competed with the checkout for the same engineering time.
Result: Support could handle refunds, disputes and settlements without engineers, and reconciliation became reliable.
A mobile-first creator checkout with tips, pay-what-you-want and buyer messages.
Pricing and settlement in multiple currencies.
Payment routing across three or more providers per priority country, with automatic retries.
A backoffice for routing, refunds, disputes, settlements and reconciliation.
Creators and buyers: Payment rejections dropped from ~60% to ~5%.
Business: An ARR lift of ~$1M, driven largely by creators recommending Beu to each other.
Operations: ~40% lower processing costs.
I'd start the operations backoffice before the checkout, not in parallel. Almost every early problem showed up there. I'd also launch in one country first and track rejection reasons per provider from day one, before scaling the routing.
