Small Checkbox, Big Impact.
Tripling Registration Rate from 2.1% to 6.8%
Challenge
Why It Matters
Iteration 1.0: The First Instinct
By 2022, MenuSifu’s online ordering system had served over 15 million customers. However, only 2.1% of users chose to register during checkout, while most continued as guests.
Turning anonymous users into recognized customers creates value across the entire ecosystem.
For customers, it enables personalized experiences and more relevant engagement.
For restaurants, it unlocks the ability to understand their customers, support targeted marketing, and improve retention.
For MenuSifu, it strengthens trust across both restaurants and customers, which can drive revenue growth and lay the foundation for future platform expansion (e.g., Uber Eats, DoorDash) .
To understand what motivates customers to register, I collaborated with sales and marketing team to analyze successful loyalty programs and interview restaurant owners directly. We found that 77% of them offered welcome rewards that could be redeemed immediately, and made those benefits highly visible at the point of ordering.
Instead of interrupting users with account creation upfront, I shifted the experience to reveal the reward first through a banner, which allows users to understand the value before committing to registration.
With pressure to improve registration quickly, I adopted a familiar industry pattern: prompting users to sign up before entering the ordering flow, reinforced by a persistent promotional banner.
Visibility alone didn’t drive registration. Users ignored both approaches because they didn’t yet see why registration mattered.
High interrruption
Continuous Reminder
Customers only considered registration when they could clearly see what they would get in return.
Low visibility
96% of users dismissed the sign-up prompt immediately, while the banner CTR is only 0.3%.
How might we encourage customers to register without disrupting the fast ordering experience?
Original Experience
Sign in was visually secondary and easy to overlook.
Registration-Focused Experience
Full-screen signup prompt captures immediate attention before user browsing. Banner reinforces the message while users continue browsing.
The redesign wasn’t about the banner UI. It was about the timing of commitment.
Flexible banner framework
Registration Journey
Restaurants can tailor the onboarding incentive to match their customer acquisition strategy in their loyalty dashboard.
*Example reward types shown above.
Welcome Banner
How Does It Work
Create Account
Complete Information
Making the incentive visible increased banner click rate from 0.3% to 11.7%, proving that customers responded positively to clear upfront value.
However, they still dropped off once registration required additional effort.
Incentive works.
But registration completion remained low.
Result & Insight
0.3%
11.7%
Banner Viewed
100%
11.7%
4.1%
1.2%
Banner Clicked
Registration
Started
Registration
Completed
CTR After (With Incentive)
CTR Before (No Incentive)
Iteration 2.0: Do Incentives Work?
Iteration 3.0: The Checkbox Solution
Could we make registration feel like a part of checkout, instead of a separate task?
After stepping back and reviewing the guest checkout flow with the online ordering team again, I realized customers had already completed most of the steps required for registration. This made it possible to embed loyalty enrollment directly into checkout.
Registration was already happening inside checkout.
We just weren’t treating it that way.
Name
Phone (Verified)
Information Collected in Guest Checkout
Original Guest Checkout
Customers were already completing most of the steps required for registration during guest checkout.
The registration rate increased from 2.1% to 6.8% after embedding loyalty enrollment directly into checkout.
The checkbox embed loyalty enrollment directly into checkout.
Registration no longer felt like a separate task.
As friction disappeared, the registration rate tripled from
2.1% → 6.8%
The reward appeared instantly in checkout, reinforcing the benefit in real time.
Final Solution: The Checkbox
Once the phone number was verified, the system could identify existing loyalty members.
Customers who hadn’t joined the loyalty program would see the welcome reward directly in checkout. Registration no longer felt like extra work.
Result
Takeaway
Registration rate tripled
Expanded across product lines
The enrollment model was later extended to Kiosk and Emenu products, scaling the low-friction onboarding experience across multiple ordering touch points.
Customers received rewards immediately while continuing checkout naturally, without interruption or additional effort.
A smoother reward experience
Sometimes timing matters more than the feature itself.