Just say ‘Go’

High street retailer Marks & Spencer is undergoing a significant transformation as they seek to place digital at the heart of their business, which includes investing in digital and mobile technology that will help improve the customer experience in-store.

We partnered with Marks & Spencer to develop the Mobile Pay Go service to create a mobile-first shopping experience.

The service revolutionizes the in-store experience for M&S Food customers, enabling users to beat the queues by scanning products, paying and leaving the store in one seamless experience.

Working collaboratively, our teams built the service ready for a live employee trial in just 12 weeks.

Marks & Spencer Global Head of Digital Product and UX Jim Cruickshank and team identified an opportunity to deliver on this vision for a mobile-first shopping experience by enabling customers to pay for items in-store using their own devices, removing the need to wait in line.

The perfect opportunity presented itself to pilot the new service when a new store opening at its Waterside Head Office was confirmed for summer 2018 — but time was short.

With M&S’s development teams engaged on other projects and accelerated timelines to hit, the team decided to look for external suppliers who had:

•  A collaborative team that could work side-by-side with M&S product and UX teams to deliver a high-quality experience for customers.

•  A track record of delivering innovative new services in complex environments, and experience integrating Stripe to fast-track payments functionality.

•  A technical approach that follows best practice to ensure a smooth handover back to M&S teams.

M&S quickly recognized we fit this brief. Our engineers, testers and products owners joined forces with an M&S product owner and designer. Over the following 12 weeks, the team delivered the innovative Mobile Pay Go for the launch of the new store.

The M&S app, integrated with the Sparks loyalty program, detects when customers are within an M&S store and triggers Mobile Pay Go functionality. Customers can use the app to scan product barcodes with their device camera, which are added to the app basket. When the customer is ready to pay, they can make one-tap payments using their stored cards or Apple Pay.

Three key elements enabled the team to deliver the service at pace:

Close collaboration across the team

Our engineers worked closely with M&S product and UX teams to provide continuous feedback and tight iteration loops to ensure a quality experience for customers.

An example of this can be seen in the payment experience. When testing an early prototype, the team found it was almost too easy to pay, and users were tapping and paying before they had completed their shop. As a result, the team switched to a swipe across interaction to prevent mistaken payments.

Native front-end best practice

Delivering the service through the core Marks & Spencer app required some creative thinking to minimisz the impact on the existing iOS development team while ensuring a smooth integration.

Adopting M&S technical standards

The team deployed and ran everything in Azure and M&S’s Kubernetes cluster, including an API we built to handle payments and the completion of transactions in M&S systems.

Following M&S's latest technical standards and closely collaborating with M&S engineers and product managers ensured quality and ease of handover to the team who are now supporting the service.