THE PROBLEM
While Amazon markets the premium Prime service’s free 2 day delivery, many people do not realize that Best Buy offers very similar delivery windows with no subscription required. Thanks to their distribution network of warehouses, coupled with a 1000+ strong brick and mortar presence, customers have far more options than most competitors can offer. For the 2016 holiday shopping season, the business wanted to introduce a feature to all product listings and page to surface this information. The goal would be to show users an accurate shipping, delivery, or store pickup time.
This new feature was set to roll out during ‘Power week’ in November, which is the Monday before ‘Black Friday’. Our team was given this task in early October. We had a lot of work to do.
MY ROLE
My task as the UX architect was to work with business, fulfillment, and our tech teams to identify and document the various scenarios. For each item type, various data points needed to be considered. Things such as regional availability, delivery only, or warehouse location relative to the customer’s address. Documentation of the various logic flows of these conditions were created to capture this information.
With our previous work on the Local Store Availability feature, we already had the UI in place to allow customers to quickly see items that were available in their immediate area. Building on this work, we added in the ability to see how quickly an item could be shipped to them, taking into account the often per-item logic necessary to accurately reflect these times. In one place a customer could see what was available in their local store, but also how fast it could make it to their home for free (with the occasional paid upgrade for same-day). While this sounds like it should be easy, it took an incredible amount of effort for our team to figure out how to untangle the mess that is internal distribution logic.
THE OUTCOME
The ‘fast and free’ shipping option was completed on time, and rolled out during the all-important holiday shopping season. The impact that it created was immediate, with millions of dollars of revenue being directly attributed to the feature.
