Little things that make a difference
The number one question I received in my email after purchasing the site was “I don’t have a PayPal account how do I pay for my classified?”
PayPal didn’t make it easy to pay with a credit card if you didn’t have a PayPal account. They buried the pay with credit card button at the bottom of the page. It was annoying and I always felt for Playlist customers especially because this was one step in a tragic multi-step process to purchase anything on the site (an unfortunate necessity of the way the site was built and the services used).
And so as we plan to launch the new Minnesota Playlist with our development partners Ten7, I’m excited to highlight two major changes coming to the Playlist purchase experience.
Streamlined shopping
The first is a massively streamlined purchase process. No more bumping out to an external site to buy something and then being redirected back to Playlist. Purchases will be integrated into the store and will include only the minimum fields we need to complete the transaction. Future enhancements will hopefully include things like Apple and Google Pay to make the process even easier.
This new shopping experience should make things much faster, easier to understand, and provide the community with some time saving when ordering on Playlist. This may seem like a small thing, particularly to folks who have been using Playlist for years. And really, yes, it is a small thing.
However, Playlist approves new accounts almost daily. We consistently see new folks engaging with Playlist for their first time. And creating a shopping experience with minimal friction improves the overall perceived value of Playlist for our community. And that: the perceived value, is the reason that Playlist has been around as long as we have. I see it as a personal goal to always be working to improve that value, to listen to our community and make changes at Playlist that reflect what our community needs and wants.
Sometimes though, I try to think a bit bigger and surprise our community.
The shift to Stripe
Since its inception Playlist has used PayPal as the merchant processor for transactions. I’m incredibly excited to announce that with the launch of the new site we’ll be transitioning to Stripe.
If you don’t know about Stripe I encourage you to learn more about their values and particularly, the co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison, who has done some amazing work in the scientific philanthropy sector. (Here is a really great podcast between Ezra Klein from the NYT where they talk about that work.)
There are two main reasons we are moving to Stripe.
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Simplicity - as mentioned in my article The New Look one of the big goals of this rebuild is to make the site simpler. Stripe does just that. Some of that simplicity will be on the front end - experienced by users like yourself. And some is on the backend - for me. Overall, I believe that this move will provide simplicity now, and as we announce some exciting new things in 2023, simplicity in the future.
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Values - one of the exciting benefits of working with Stripe is to tap into the good they are doing in the world. They have a strong focus on scientific analysis around topics that matter. One of those is their commitment to action around climate change. Playlist will be participating in the Stripe Climate program: donating 1.5% of our revenue to scale emerging carbon removal technologies.
These small adjustments matter over time. Our communities' continued use of the site will help fund climate change mitigation. I’m excited for all the little changes that our community will experience with the new Minnesota Playlist. Stay tuned throughout the end of the year for additional updates leading up to our (new) launch date in early 2023.
