GIFT RECIPIENT SCHEDULING:
Redefining the Gift Delivery Experience to minimize gift returns and maximize delivery success rate
Client
Total Wine & More
Date
March 2022 - August 2022
My Role
Lead Product Designer across mobile web, desktop, and mobile app platforms. Responsibilities included competitive analysis, concepting, design iterations, user research, stakeholder alignment, user flows, visual design, prototyping, usability testing, incorporating user feedback into design iterations, collaboration across product teams, and quality assurance.
Project Overview
During the fall and holiday months, e-commerce companies like Total Wine sell massive quantities of gifts to customers to be delivered all over the United States. Selling alcohol, and thus requiring a customer to be over 21 to receive an order, presents an even more unique set of circumstances. Customers were going about the gifting process as they usually did for other products, but then being forced to guess when their gift recipient would be home to sign for the package, resulting in large numbers of canceled gifts and returned items.
The goal for this project changed the delivery focus to the recipient. Let’s allow a customer to give a gift, and then let the recipient schedule their own delivery. This process, if executed well, could provide relief to thousands of customers throughout the holiday season and beyond, while also preventing unhappy customers and returned item company losses.
Upon launch in the fall of 2022, the gift recipient scheduling experience resulted in over $5 million dollars in sales across web and app platforms, highlighting a 94% recipient completion rate across nearly 25,000 orders. This project has prevented hundreds of hours of calls to customer support lines, and made the gifting experience much easier for both customers and the gift recipients alike.
Upon launch in the fall of 2022, the gift recipient scheduling experience resulted in over $5 million dollars in sales across web and app platforms, highlighting a 94% recipient completion rate across nearly 25,000 orders.
The Challenge
Before this experience launched, a customer would select a delivery time slot regardless of whether the product was to be gifted or not. It now became necessary to ensure that a customer giving a gift would be prompted with the option to have their recipient schedule. This meant that we had to be certain a customer would indicate a gift BEFORE leaving their cart. We also had to figure out a way to be up front about the cost of these gifting options without being overwhelming. Customers would need to be informed throughout the gifting process.
Did their gift recipient schedule the delivery?
What about receiving it?
What would the notification process look like for both the gift giver and the gift recipient?
How might we make the process as simple as possible for a gift recipient, someone who might never have encountered our product before?
The user experience began at the cart level and diverged from there. Indicating an order was a gift became the top priority, in order to ensure the experience diverged accordingly.
Letting the Recipient Schedule
Once a customer indicated a gift order, AND the order was for delivery, a new screen was launched before time slot selection. The screens went through several iterations before landing on the eventual design. This new screen actually defaults to a recipient scheduling their own delivery. This was a big risk, but one we felt confident in after multiple rounds of user testing.
User Testing
During testing it became apparent that pricing ruled supreme. People really needed to know the costs involved in each delivery selection before making it. Understandable!
Scheduling Screen
A version was selected that picked a base cost for recipients to schedule. This was a business decision based on the opportunity cost of all the orders that were previously canceled or returned that would now be delivered, and also accounted for testing results showing customers responding to transparency in pricing.
Recipient Flow
The recipient scheduling process was made as simple as possible. Click a button in your email and pick a time - no need to overcomplicate things!
Gift Giver Experience
The gift giver experience allows for two paths - allowing the recipient to schedule, and scheduling yourself. These final flows allow for a simple and straightforward structure to the gifting experience.
Results
Gift Recipient Scheduling launched on the Total Wine & More website and mobile app in the fall of 2022. The resulting gifting experience has resulted in over $5 million dollars in sales across web and app platforms, highlighting a 94% recipient completion rate across nearly 25,000 orders. This project has prevented hundreds of hours of calls to customer support lines, and made the gifting experience much easier for both customers and the gift recipients alike.