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Decathlon Checkout

Defining a scalable checkout vision to align Product, Design and Engineering around what to build next.

Team
  • 1 Senior Product Designer
  • 1 Senior Design Director
  • 1 Group Product Manager
  • 2 Engineering VPs
Role
Product vision · UX strategy · Checkout · Global platform

Overview

Challenge

Following a major rebrand, Decathlon’s checkout vision combined fundamental customer needs with longer-term ideas, making it difficult for teams to understand what was essential, what could wait, and ultimately what they should build towards.

Approach

I worked across Product, Design, Engineering and Fulfilment to create a clearer global checkout vision, grounded in customer pain points, UX best practice and technical realities. The work focused on simplifying the underlying journey and defining the capabilities needed to scale across markets.

Outcome

The vision helped shape future roadmaps across guest checkout, address lookup, clearer delivery choices, saved payment methods and integrated membership. The first part to reach experimentation, clearer delivery options, produced a successful A/B test with a projected multi-million-euro annual commercial impact.

Impact

€8.7m

Projected annual commercial impact of clearer delivery options (A/B test)

Four checkout screens from the invisible checkout concept, side by side: a guest filling in delivery details with address lookup, a recognised customer greeted with a welcome-back login prompt, a member’s one-page checkout already filled in, and the Members Club offer on the order confirmation inviting guests to set a password and earn 520 points.
Invisible checkout concept: guest → recognised → member → convert

Process

01

Simplify the journey first

Before designing anything, I mapped the current and proposed journeys for guests and members to identify where we could remove unnecessary steps.

A simple principle emergedDon’t ask customers for information we already know.

For guests, this meant removing account creation from the critical path.

For recognised customers, it meant using known information and previous choices to progressively reduce effort.

Current vs proposed journey · guest and signed-out member
02

Make checkout increasingly invisible

The vision became less about redesigning checkout and more about reducing how much customers needed to think about it.

  1. GuestAsk only what’s needed to purchase.
  2. Recognised customerUse what we already know.
  3. MemberUse saved addresses, fulfilment preferences and payment methods.
  4. Post-purchaseMake membership easy to join without blocking the transaction.

Recognise me when you can, make it easy when you can’t.

Guest checkout
Recognised member
03

Turn the vision into capabilities

Rather than treating the concept as one large redesign, we broke it into capabilities that could independently improve the journey.

  • Guest checkoutRemove unnecessary commitment Checkout opening with a single email field; delivery and payment wait until needed.
  • Address lookup and autocompleteRemove unnecessary typing Typing “54 granary road” returns two matching addresses to pick from, with a link to enter it manually.
  • Clearer delivery options, including fastest and cheapestRemove unnecessary decisions Delivery, pick-up and collect tiles, then two delivery options tagged Cheapest and Fastest.
  • Saved addresses, delivery preferences and payment methodsRemove unnecessary repetition A member’s checkout already filled in: email, delivery address, delivery option and Mastercard ending 3423.
  • Integrated sign-upMake membership additive “It’s better to be a member” box listing faster checkout, 1-year returns and discount vouchers, with a Sign me up checkbox.
The capability → what it removes → how it looked in the concept

This gave Product and Engineering a clearer foundation for prioritisation and future roadmaps.

04

Make a global vision work locally

A simple customer experience crossed multiple areas of ownership internally.

I worked with Product, Engineering, Fulfilment and Design leadership to surface conflicting priorities, technical dependencies and market requirements.

The aim was to separate experience principles that should remain consistent globally from implementation decisions that needed flexibility locally.

05

From north star to roadmap

The vision wasn’t intended to ship as one large redesign.

It established a shared destination, then allowed individual capabilities to be prioritised, funded and tested independently.

  1. North starAn increasingly invisible checkout
  2. Capabilities
    • Guest checkout
    • Address intelligence
    • Fulfilment
    • Recognition
    • Saved preferences
    • Payment
    • Membership
  3. Roadmap
    1. Test
    2. Learn
    3. Build
    4. Scale
One destination, capabilities that can each be funded and tested on their own
Express payment: basket to confirmed
06

Outcome

One of the first capabilities taken forward was clearer delivery choices.

The resulting A/B test successfully validated the direction, with a projected €8.7m annual commercial impact.

Other capabilities followed into testing:

buyer rate · Guest checkout
+2.88%
sign-in rate · Email recognition note
+23%
  • Global vision established
  • Core capabilities defined
  • Future roadmap shaped
  • First capability tested

The work gave the checkout organisation a common destination, and a practical way to start getting there.