ConectaPay
Turning payment hardware into a retail data relationship
- Payments
- Retail
- Hardware
- Client
- BAT Brasil
- Year
- 2023
- Discipline
- Design & Product
- Role
- Product Specialist
What I did
- End-to-end design of the POS terminal flows: sale, instalments, receipt reprint and reversal
- Product catalogue and barcode capture built into the checkout, not bolted beside it
- Per-product cashback surfaced at the moment of sale as the incentive to scan
- Industry credit balance as a running, visible reason to keep using the terminal
- Daily reconciliation reporting for the shopkeeper
- Design system for a small, low-contrast, glove-and-counter screen
ConectaPay was built with British American Tobacco to tighten the relationship between the industry and the retailers who actually sell its products. The vehicle is a smart payment terminal: it takes the sale like any other POS, but it also captures what was sold, which is information the industry otherwise never sees.
The problem
An industry partner selling through thousands of independent corner shops is blind past the distributor. It knows what it shipped. It does not know what reached a customer, at what price, in what mix, or how any of that responded to a campaign.
The obvious fixes all fail at the counter:
- Asking the shopkeeper to report adds unpaid admin work to a busy till.
- A separate app competes with the payment terminal already in hand and loses.
- Distributor data is a proxy for sell-in, never sell-out.
The shopkeeper, meanwhile, has their own problem: they want a terminal that takes money quickly and does not slow the queue down.
What I did
The design bet was that capture has to ride on a transaction that was going to happen anyway, and it has to pay the shopkeeper to happen.
Scanning is part of checkout, not an extra step. Products go into the sale through a barcode scan and a catalogue built into the terminal, so the act that produces the data is the same act that rings up the sale.
Cashback is the incentive, shown at the moment it is earned. The receipt names the identified products and the cashback each one generated. The value is small per item and concrete, which is what makes it credible: the shopkeeper sees the scan turn into money on the same screen as the sale.
The credit balance is the retention loop. A running industry credit total gives the terminal a reason to be the preferred one on the counter, rather than whichever machine is closest.
The payment path stayed boring on purpose. Card type, cash or instalments up to four, tap/insert/swipe. Around it sit the operations a real shop needs and most terminals handle badly: receipt reprint with an explicit choice of merchant copy, customer copy or both; reversal with a confirmation step; and a daily report that reconciles the day’s takings without exporting anything.