Turning a stalled seller funnel into a marketplace growth engine

01 / The Problem

FlexPay had grown quickly on the merchant side but the seller-facing platform hadn't kept pace. New seller sign-up required 14 manual steps across three separate tools, with no progress saving — 58% of sellers abandoned mid-onboarding. On the buyer side, the checkout flow buried the BNPL option below the fold and defaulted to full payment, meaning most buyers never saw the core product proposition. Internal data showed that buyers who did use BNPL had a 2.3× higher repeat purchase rate, but only 19% of eligible transactions were completing via that route.

02 / Our Approach

We embedded with FlexPay's product and growth teams for a 2-week discovery sprint. Session recordings, funnel analytics, and interviews with 12 recently-churned sellers surfaced three root causes: cognitive overload in the sign-up form, a lack of progress feedback, and no inline help for compliance questions around KYC. On the checkout side, A/B test data from a previous agency engagement showed that leading with monthly payment amounts (rather than total cost) increased BNPL selection by 28% — but the finding had never made it into production. We validated the hypothesis with a rapid prototype tested on 40 buyers before committing to a full build.