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.
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.