Europe’s leading mobile wallet, Stocard, helps retail partners shape future strategy using valuable insights from Mixpanel.

Stocard​ is Europe’s leading mobile wallet, making the daily shopping experience easy, engaging, and rewarding for close to 50 million users. Their innovative and easy-to-use app allows users to turn their smartphone into a mobile wallet, revolutionizing how people shop, pay and access financial services.

Stocard provides a high frequency digital loyalty platform for retailers, enabling them to reach their target audience at the right time and place. State-of-the-art analytics quantify the impact of their mobile advertising efforts in terms of store traffic and in-store sales.

Since inception, Stocard has helped facilitate several billion transactions at the point of sale. The company has been listed as one of the best apps of the year by Apple and is one of the few Android Excellence apps selected by the Google team.

Part of Stocard’s success is the company’s commitment to always providing value, whether that’s creating the most seamless experience for users or providing guidance to their retail partners, according to Lukas Stehr, Lead Data & Design. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Stocard team knew retailers would be severely affected by the quarantine measures and wanted to figure out how they could further support their partners.

“We can precisely measure when users go shopping in brick-and-mortar stores based on real world data, combining location technologies, loyalty card usages, and payments in Mixpanel as our analytics solution. We regularly pull this data from Mixpanel so we can provide reports to our retailers around topics like shopping cycles, industry trends, competitor comparisons and how their advertising content impacts conversions,” said Lukas.

The Stocard team knew their retail partners were keenly interested in understanding the changes in shopping behavior during the pandemic and quarantine measures. There was also a lack of data available in the market since the day-to-day situation was evolving so rapidly.

With Mixpanel’s ​Insights​ feature, Stocard was able to share valuable insights with retailers on shopping patterns. “This way we could show partners what was happening in their category in real time in other European countries, including peak shopping times and volumes,” said Lukas. Especially for retailers in countries with a later outbreak of COVID-19, those insights proved invaluable, as they allowed them to prepare for what was to come.

“It’s easy to pull this data with Insights because the report is so flexible. We can visualize data through a variety of charts and compare shopping cycles week over week. We also used custom properties to map retailers to industries, so that we could break down the data by category,” said Lukas.

“Our retail partners were very thankful for this information and we were thrilled that we could help them be more strategic during these difficult times,” said Lukas.

Improving onboarding conversions with A/B testing

A key part of Stocard’s onboarding flow is adding a card to your mobile wallet. Users rave about how “magical” this process feels, which is exactly what the team is aiming for.“You choose the card you want to add, then a scanner opens up, you place your card in front of the camera and et voilà! Your card pops up in the app, looking like an exact replica of the physical version. Users are so excited when they experience this for the first time; it’s the magical moment when they become engaged in the product,” said Lukas.The Stocard team ended up designing this process by combining Mixpanel’s ​Funnels and A/B testing​ with user interviews. “With A/B testing, we can see what works.

User interviews tell us why it works. Early on, we realized that our app should be simple enough for anyone to use. We know that we did a good job when all of our grandmothers can use it,” said Lukas.The process at Stocard is extremely collaborative. Prior to making new changes in the app, Lukas and the team gather perspectives from different departments across the company, including designers, developers, and customer support. This helps them to inform what future A/B tests they should run.“Overall, we’ve run over 200 A/B tests using Mixpanel. We only make a few tweaks every time, but that completely transforms the product over the course of a year. We believe that the success of our app is tied to its simplicity—and Mixpanel played a crucial part in helping us achieve that,” said Lukas.

Empowering every employee to make better decisions

Next to Mixpanel, Stocard used Google Analytics and another mobile analytics tool in the beginning, but encountered limitations around flexibility and the inability to break down data as granularly as they wanted. “We’ve always had Mixpanel, so it’s hard to imagine life any other way,” said Lukas.Mixpanel is so integral to the company that it’s actually baked into the company’s onboarding process for new employees. “Every employee at the company makes important decisions every day—and we want to provide them with the data and training to make those decisions as thoughtfully as possible,” said Lukas.During new hire onboarding, there’s a session devoted to the importance of analytics and new hires are given a tutorial on how to use Mixpanel.

The core of the training is a quiz show called ​Who Wants to Be a Mixpanelionaire?“We pose business questions like, ‘Which country had the highest growth on Android in the past month?’ with four options and then we let employees guess based on their gut feeling. Then, we walk them through finding the answer in Mixpanel,” said Lukas. “This exercise allows employees to actively engage with the product and shows them many of their questions can be answered using Mixpanel.”As a result of these onboarding efforts, 84% of Stocard’s employees use Mixpanel on a regular basis, including product, sales, marketing, engineering, support, design and business operations teams.

“The effect of our data-driven approach with Mixpanel can be seen everywhere in the company – including the instant reaction to the pandemic and the hundreds of A/B tests which help create magical experiences for our users,” said Lukas.