Order Fulfillment Redesign
Reinventing the way Part Counter employees ship from their online parts store.
The User
A Parts Counter employee who spend their days fulfilling orders from their online parts store.
Problems
There’s not a lot of users using the older order fulfillment page. Processing an order is confusing, time consuming and costing part managers on average -$0.40 cents per shipment.
Our Goal
Getting parts out for shipment with just a few easy clicks while increasing revenue for online part stores. Also, increase the adoption rate.
Breaking Down Old Walls
We kicked off the project by entering a week-long design sprint.
First, we started breaking down the old experience, screen by screen, click by click. By doing so we revealed weak points and discovered potential solutions.
We didn’t just take our word for it. We also did a competitive analysis and a handful of internal and external interviews to help bring our ideas to life.
Low Fidelity
We shared the prototypes with 5 existing customers to reinsure we were on the right track before heading into development.
High Fidelity
After our feedback from the low fidelity prototype I began to polish and clearly define the UI specs for the developers. Making sure the product was being represented as intended before handing it off.
Our Discovery
The old experience was built more like a wizard. It would guide the user through a step-by-step process until the customer’s order was fulfilled.
In a nutshell, the old experience went down like this:
Step One
The user would select an item they wanted to ship from the orders page.
After they selected an item, a modal would overlay on the same page. From there they would select a preferred carrier to start the order fulfillment process.
Step Two
The user would enter the item’s weight and dimensions manually. To gather this information they would have to remember it or step out of the wizard experience and back to the orders page.
This was slowing the process down incredibly. Part Managers have tons of orders to process on a daily bases.
Step Three
The user would then retrieve quotes based on the carrier and package information that was previously entered.
We discovered that customers had no way to compare the carrier’s prices side-by-side.
Also, the best option for cost and delivery was never surfaced properly to help maximize their profit.
Our Solutions
Auto-populate packages
Part Managers spent a lot of their time shipping the same parts over and over.
To help cut back on mundane task, we started collecting the user’s package information that was tied to a particular part in their inventory.
We took this data and added a suggested packaging notification. This would auto-populate the package information as soon as the user clicked “Use packages”.
Side-by-side comparison
After the Parts Manager entered their package information. We instantly fetched shipping quotes. As they continued to edit or add packages new quotes would gather in real-time without clicking a button to update.
We ranked the shipping quotes from top to bottom. We set the recommended quote at the very top. This was predetermined based on what shopper’s expectation was regarding delivery time and cost.
From here the Parts Manager could see if they were making a profit and meeting delivery expectations at the same time.
Slide into a New Era of Order Fulfillment
On average Part Managers are now saving a $1.00 more when shipping a product. We also saw 90% of our selected beta testers opt in. We were confident we would see an increase in customers using the new product going forward.