W45 - Further Discussion on B2B Quality and Experience Issues

Recently two business partners reported issues with the B-side checkout. While communicating and investigating them, I was prompted to think more broadly about long-term quality and experience for B2B payments.

The first was a complaint from Kuaidlv about the B-side checkout experience. We specifically aligned with Kuaidlv’s product and engineering colleagues and discussed the collected bad cases, reconciling both sides’ needs and constraints.

The second was a report from a catering SaaS about SDK errors in the checkout. Because the SDK version is relatively old, its quality monitoring has long been lacking, which ultimately made troubleshooting difficult. Given this library’s large impact and generally stable operation, we have been cautious about making changes to the SDK.

Both issues are essentially the business side raising higher expectations of us. That means our stage of development has changed and we must set different requirements for ourselves at each stage to adequately prepare for future changes.

Early B2B payments resembled a third-party payment landing page. After nearly a year of iterations, we have largely built a complete payments product, forming closed loops around accounts, funds, and traffic.

Looking ahead, Kuaidlv and Youxuan are the partners most likely to scale. Before order volumes surge, we need to prepare proactively on experience and quality.

Kuaidlv is a special B2B scenario—its business flow resembles a C-side buyer’s market, so demanding checkout experience is only natural. Next, we need to address current issues with short- and long-term experience plans: short-term focusing on offline and Shark, long-term leveraging Neo’s outcomes, and using this as a testbed for Neo’s B-side platformization. We are currently in the phase of communicating with parties and collecting information.

Quality is the primary issue for the checkout. So far we have focused efforts on quality assurance and monitoring for the checkout homepage, but investments in quality for the SDK and contracted payments are far from sufficient. This shows up as an inability on the frontend to compute technical SLA metrics and a lack of cross-project, full-chain monitoring for payment flows—these are priorities to implement next.