Many customers are not picking up their orders when they order online
Nordstrom customers have limited flexibility when it comes to picking up online orders at a store. By enabling customers to extend their pickup window digitally, we freed up store labor and saw significantly reduced pickup abandonment rates.
+$11.1M
+3%
<80%
- Role
- Domain
- Responsibilities
- Date
- Lead Designer
- Fulfillment & Returns
- Discovery, Task Flows, Blueprint, Strategy, UX, Execution
- 2021
Nordstrom offers buy online and pick up in store as a fulfillment option for customers
Our stores are considered a fulfillment center, and buying online and picking up in store (BOPUS) is a huge part of sales. When a customer places a BOPUS order, they are given a 7 day window to pick up before it is returned.
When a customer shops with us online at Nordstrom, we offer the options to pick up at a store or ship to home.
The problem is that time is money
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Business
Customer
Store
We would be early adopters for extend pickup
When compared to 11 different retailers who offer a similar flavor of buying online and picking up in store, only Best Buy and Target offer their customers the ability to extend their pickup window without having to call the store. By enabling customers to extend their pickup window online, Nordstrom would be an early adopter.
We currently communicate pickup statuses through email and purchase history, with no option to extend pickup window online
This feature could live in several different touch-points within the pre-purchase and post-purchase customer journey. Some touch-points would be more suitable for messaging and awareness and others to perform the action of extending pickup. I mapped out the customer flow with touch-points where design changes would need to occur within their email communications and account order details.
Based on data, we want to offer customers 3 extra days to pick up an order
My product partners decided to test giving an additional 3 days for a pickup extension for the MVP and reiterate with +/- days depending on how abandonment rates were affected. With the different fulfillment types, this table shows how long items could be sitting at Order Pickup when a customer requests a pickup extension.
🟢: The 7 day pickup window given to customers (They receive a pickup reminder email on day 4)
🔵: The 3 extra days to pick up
When a customer requests a pickup extension, we also need to communicate this to store associates
Store employees check whether an order is expired by looking at the stickers placed on the bag or on the app they use to handle pickup orders (Order Pickup Tool - OPT). If a customer requests a pickup extension, the store employees will need to print new stickers with the new pickup deadline.
Information is pushed and pulled to make a pickup extension happen
I created a user flow that illustrates how information is pushed and pulled when a customer requests a pickup extension for an order and how store employee's honor the request.
Hypothesis
By giving customers more flexibility and control to extend their pickup window, we will see more customers picking up their orders who still want their order
For MVP, we needed a light solution to allow customers to request a pickup extension
I explored different placements to display the extend pickup call to action. Since orders can be a mixture of pickup and shipping, I proposed version B where extend pickup lives within a release level as this action would only pertain to pickup items and not the entire order at a global level.
However, further constraints left us needing to extend from pickup email instead
With my content design partner, Lianne Minnis, we explored different placements in which the extend pickup feature could scale with our north-star email explorations shown below. The goals of these explorations was to improve content hierarchy for scan-ability and support other new capabilities. However, since theres technical barriers keeping us from making these structural changes now, so for the MVP we will use our current email template.
MVP launch
For the MVP, customers will be able to extend their pickup window through an email link using our current email structure.
MVP results
$11.1M
3%
<80%
Next steps
In the future, we are hoping to bring this action to be made from the customer's account so that it can be dynamically updated and could easily be referred back to by the customer. We also hope to inform the customer about the opportunity to extend pickup in other communication touch-points other than their email.
The team behind the magic
👤 Franklin Huynh (UX Designer)
👤 Aneesa Memon (Product Manager)
👤 Lisa Kivindyo (Product Manager)
👤 Casi Schwisow (Product Manager)
👤 Chris Zheng (UX Designer)
👤 Jules Neigher (Content Designer)
👤 Ashley Zammitt (UX Design Manager)
