Problem statement
On eazle, users could only pay via cash or credit on delivery. This created inefficiencies for both customers and distributors, who needed safer and more convenient payment options.
Opportunity
By enabling digital payment (ePay) options, we could introduce a secure, quick, and modern way for users to complete transactions. This would also give distributors more confidence in payments, reduce manual work, and open the door to incentives such as online payment discounts.
Context
At the time, eazle only supported payments on delivery. To scale globally, we needed a solution that could:
Work across different countries and regions.
Support card payments (credit and debit).
Allow for alternative payment methods (APMs).
We started with South Africa as the pilot region.
Research and stakeholder interviews
We began with a series of interviews with stakeholders to better understand the payment landscape in South Africa.
Key insights:
Adoption of online payments
Online payments are becoming more common in South Africa, particularly in B2C.
However, cash use is still high because of the large informal economy.
Pain points for B2B customers
Currently, there are no integrated online payments.
Customers need to manually transfer money through their banking app, email proof of payment to Heineken, and then wait for order confirmation.
This creates unnecessary friction and delays.
Discounts as an incentive
Discounts are linked to customer master data (CMD), which contains trade terms based on risk analysis.
Discounts are flexible and can vary depending on conditions (e.g., seasonal promotions or payment deadlines).
At the time, there was no vision for volume-based discounts (e.g., buy more, save more).
These conversations made it clear that adoption would depend on two things: reducing friction in the payment process and building in the flexibility to reflect commercial terms like discounts. Download
Answer from one of participant
“The biggest pain point will be that a customer has to go onto another platform to pay Heineken (Banking App) and then email the proof of payment to our CIC, and still wait for order confirmation."
Customers can’t find relevant promotion products:
"Needs to be flexible [the discount] as discount might change across many variables… the discount may change over peak period, for example, to give customers more time to pay or higher discounts."
Alongside interviews, we partnered with a payment provider to map the full end-to-end flow, identify technical constraints, and decide which steps would be handled internally versus externally. We also carried out competitive benchmarking across both B2B and B2C platforms. From this analysis, we identified three flows we needed to design for: a successful “happy path,” a failed payment path, and a “pending” state for situations where payments take longer to process. The pending state became particularly important, since unaddressed delays could quickly lead to user frustration.
Benchmarking and competitor analysis
Solution
The new checkout flow gave users a clear choice. At checkout, they could select the new online payment tile, and from there decide whether to pay with a card or through an alternative payment method (APM).
To build trust, we displayed recognizable payment method logos directly on the tile. Seeing familiar brands such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, or Apple Pay signaled reliability and security, reassuring users that they were making payments through legitimate and well-known providers.
We also paid close attention to the user experience in edge cases. Messaging was designed to be clear and reassuring across all scenarios: successful payments, failures, and pending states. This reduced uncertainty and frustration, particularly in cases where the system needed more time to confirm a transaction. Discounts were scoped as a post-MVP feature but were already considered in the design to ensure smooth integration later.
MVP and Beyond
For the MVP, we prioritized delivering a complete and reliable payment flow end-to-end. This meant focusing on making the core experience robust, secure, and user-friendly. After launch, the plan was to expand functionality by integrating discounts for online payments. These would be clearly reflected in the payment tile and the order summary, providing an added incentive for customers to choose online payments over cash.
To measure adoption and continuously improve the solution, we created a tracking plan with clear KPIs. We wanted to understand how many users were actually engaging with the new feature, how often payments were completed successfully, and where friction remained.
Specifically, we planned to track:
The number of users selecting the online payment option during checkout (click-through rate).
The number of users who reached the thank-you page, representing a successful end-to-end transaction (payment conversion rate).
The number of users who saw a failure message, signaling problems or friction in the process (failure rate).
This measurement framework allowed us to monitor the success of the launch and make data-driven improvements in subsequent iterations.
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