Company Context

PayFlow is a Series B fintech company offering invoicing and online payments tools for small businesses. It serves 1.8M monthly active buyers and 120K merchants, with revenue driven by payment processing fees and premium merchant subscriptions.

Problem

PayFlow has seen checkout completion decline from 68% to 61% over the last two quarters on its mobile web flow. Quantitative analytics show the largest drop happens between the shipping details step and payment confirmation, but the team does not know whether the root cause is usability friction, trust concerns, payment failures, or merchant-specific issues. Leadership wants a recommendation on which research methods to use before committing engineering resources to redesign the checkout.

You are the PM responsible for buyer checkout. Your task is not to redesign the product yet, but to determine how to investigate the problem efficiently and credibly. You need to decide when to use qualitative vs. quantitative research, how to sequence methods, and how to balance speed with confidence.

Deliverables

1. Define the decision you are trying to make and the key hypotheses behind checkout drop-off.
2. Recommend the research methods you would use, in what order, and why each method fits the problem.
3. Explain how you would segment users or merchants so the research is not overly broad.
4. Describe what evidence would be sufficient to move from research into product changes or experimentation.
5. Identify the main trade-offs in your research plan.

Constraints

• You have 4 weeks to produce a recommendation.
• Research support is limited to 1 UX researcher and 1 data analyst.
• Engineering can instrument minor event tracking changes, but cannot build major prototypes in this phase.
• Budget only supports one external vendor study, if needed.
• Leadership expects a clear go/no-go recommendation on whether a checkout redesign is warranted.