The end client for this research operates a popular multinational online store and marketplace. They wanted to improve the user experience of their payment services platform and asked us to recruit online merchants in the UK, China, Germany and Poland to take part in online IDIs.

All participants needed to be existing sellers on their marketplace, sell internationally in countries that use a different currency to their own, and be regular users of one of Several named Payment Service Providers (PSPs), including Payoneer, WorldFirst, PingPong, LianLian, AirWallex and Wise. They needed to use their PSP account to make international as well as domestic money transfers and be willing to log into the account and show how they carry out both types of payment. Some of the interviews focused on features related to value-added tax (VAT) payments. Participants recruited for these interviews also needed to be familiar

This was a challenging recruit because it was quite a niche audience: although there are lots of companies that sell internationally on our client’s marketplace, there are typically only a small number of employees in each company who handle international payments. We also needed to ensure that we had reasonable representation of the different PSPs that the client was interested in and we needed to convince each participant to log into their PSP account during the interview to demonstrate various features. In China, it is important to note that taking part in market research is considered to be a personal commitment rather than a work commitment so most participants were only able to take part in the study after the end of their workday. Despite all of these challenges, we successfully recruited 47 participants for online interviews, and our client was able to collect a lot of information on the user experience with different PSPs which they could use to improve their own platform.