The setting
runs , a shopping marketplace where consumers find, compare and buy products from merchants using buy now, pay later options. Merchants use it to reach shoppers.
A delivery package offers a discovery moment that the sending merchant wants to keep.
Cross-merchant discovery broadens shopper choice, while merchant participation depends on protecting the value of an existing customer relationship.
Who you’d be doing this for
“My jacket arrived yesterday, and I spent lunch searching three other sites for shoes to match.”
Agustin Reyes · Installment shopper · a character in this brief
Recently bought clothing from a participating merchant but has never shopped through Marketplace discovery.
What is at stake
Three fashion merchants offer 60,000 packages to reach shoppers who only manage payments in the app. You weigh a broader discovery invitation against the merchant loyalty needed to secure that space.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- cross-merchant choice vs merchant loyalty
- stated interest vs demonstrated demand
- physical distribution costs vs adjustable media spend
- broad learning vs a sufficiently focused test
Why Affirm
Marketplace discovery must earn a shopping visit from consumers who currently open the app to manage payments.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 128 more at Affirm, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Affirm. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Partner Marketing Lead (opens in a new tab)
- Execute and optimize Affirm Marketing Solutions programs across onsite Marketplace placements, offsite media, affiliate, and emerging channels.
- These campaigns will be designed to drive revenue growth, GMV, customer acquisition, and measurable value for Affirm and our merchant partners.
- Director, Partner Marketing · no longer posted
- Manage a significant co-marketing budget, ensuring disciplined allocation, compliance, and ROI.
- As Director, Partner Marketing, you will define the vision and go-to-market strategy for co-marketing campaigns across our merchant network, driving growth through onsite and offsite marketing solutions.
- Partner Marketing Manager · no longer posted
- Serve as a merchant advocate and partner with cross-functional internal teams to drive process efficiencies and share learnings to inform future-state.
- You’ll use the Affirm marketplace as a performance marketing tool and source of valuable user acquisition for merchants.
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
Similar problems at other organizations
Like this one, each of these is about figuring out which problem is actually worth solving.
Former payment-terms buyers are opening messages but not returning to place their next order.
You must weigh incremental repeat orders against the trust cost of pushing inventory at the wrong moment.
Nine of 24 consumers interviewed see another banking app as more work.
You must weigh a promise of visibility against the need to earn actual spending, not just connected accounts.
Growth strategists found overlapping audiences in five of 12 briefs for first-payment campaigns.
You decide whether AI proposes membership directly or proposes criteria for a strategist to approve before the system builds the audience.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Affirm’s Affirm Marketplace, written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Marketplace shoppers are reaching payment and seeing the purchase flow stall after product pages load.
You have to decide where the system's trace from the alert through Ads Platform and checkout stops and where an on-call engineer's own confirmation of the cause begins.
Merchant feedback is being interpreted differently across pricing reviews, slowing decisions about conversion and incremental sales.
You have to decide at what point a cluster of merchant notes stops being a draft from the AI and becomes a problem a product manager frames for the metric review.
Time-bound home shoppers leave the marketplace when Search cannot help them narrow options for a purchase date.
You must weigh useful planning signals against clear repayment terms and realistic expectations.
Other problems with a similar purpose
In each of these, as in this one, the aim is to turn ambiguous signs of buyer interest into a concrete, measurable step toward commitment.
Too few paused mid-market pros resume lead spend after reaching the budget and targeting message.
You need to weigh a sharper service-specific claim against a clean test that preserves confidence in iROAS.
Enrolled brands are stalling before their first Insider Partnership action.
You must choose which brands need tailored coaching and which need a clearer scaled path.
New users are arriving from AI-assistant questions, but their path is hidden inside generic referral traffic.
You have to weigh a focused eight-week test against a broader discovery bet with less interpretable learning.
