Overview
The Merchant Delivery Insights Dashboard, available within the SFN application, empowers merchants to access valuable On-Time Delivery (OTD) insights, including Shop Promise today.
This feature offers merchants transparency into their fulfillment services, enabling them to gauge the reliability of their shipping and assess fast shipping coverage. This information aids them in making informed decisions regarding their products.
Role
Lead Product Designer, Delivery Experience
—
I was the sole designer, working with a team of 4 engineers and a product manager.
Length
June 2022 - January 2023
Introducing Shopify Logistics
In 2019, Shopify introduced Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN)- a new way for merchants to get their orders to their customers easily and quickly. With a network of fulfillment warehouses in the U.S., we can make fulfillment affordable and accessible to all merchants- even the ones just starting to take off.
The goal for Shopify Fulfillment Network was to take care of all logistics need for merchants so that they can focus on the important stuff- growing their business.
At the end of 2019, Shopify purchased 6 Rivers System to help boost efficiencies among our warehouses. In 2022, Shopify purchased Deliverr- the largest acquisition in company history. This acquisition allows Shopify to build an end-to-end logistics platform together, forming Shopify Logistics.
The importance of great delivery experience
A smooth delivery experience is incredibly important in today's world. Whether you're waiting on a pair of shoes or a bike, how and when it gets to your door matters. A good delivery experience shows customers that we cares about their convenience and reliability. This can turn a one-time buyer into a loyal customer and bring in more business through recommendations. On the flip side, a bad delivery experience can hurt one’s reputation and lose them customers. So, in our digital age, merchants that focus on making deliveries easy and efficient can stay ahead and build strong customer relationships.
For our Shopify Logistics merchants, they depend on us to provide that great experience for their customers. Merchants need to know they can trust us to provide on-time delivery and shipping, but how can they be sure if the information isn't readily available?
9 in 10 customers say they may abandon their online shopping cart if delivery terms are poor
86% of customers said they prefer to wait no more than three days for a delivery,
41% of customers place the blame for late deliveries on retailers
85% of customers will not shop with a retailer again after having had a poor delivery experience
Stats provided by chainstoreage.com
Our problem: no insight into our insights
The SFN app today features all the information and data you need to move your inventory into the network but no way to really understand how it’s performing once the inventory is sold. Are the orders being delivered on time? How fast are the orders being delivered? Are there any major issues? This is a top concern with our existing and potential merchants.
Currently, merchants can access this information by speaking with our merchant success team, who guide them through charts and data on network performance and any significant issues. However, the drawback is that merchants can't access this data on their own schedule, and our merchant success team has to prepare it before each call.
Providing merchants with a unified experience
Additionally, with the acquisition of Deliverr, we want to ensure that our merchants are getting the same experience between both platforms as we continue to merge the services together.
With the Deliverr Seller Portal platform, they provide merchants with delivery insights on their dashboard. These insights though are informative, are not accurate due to inventory movements and are almost always unavailable. This makes it difficult for merchants to be able to access the information.
The dashboard most of the time
Our key findings
Based on our research, we were able to summarize what merchants are looking for when it comes to their delivery experience.
Merchants want to easily see that their customers are getting reliable delivery experience and fast shipping coverage.
Merchants want to understand how reliable Shopify Logistics is across different delivery speed so they have proof that their customers are getting reliable delivery.
Merchants want to understand how reliable their Shop Promise experience was in Q4 2022 and fast shipping coverage to help inform decisions.
Merchants want to easily understand their on-time delivery promise relative to the expected network performance so that they can discuss on how to improve OTD for their customers.
Why we need insights on SFN
As Shopify Logistics, building trust with our merchants is important. They're placing their most valuable assets, their inventory, in our hands, which essentially means entrusting strangers with their business.
As a team, we've identified 3 cases where merchants can gain significant benefits from these insights to help improve their delivery experience.
Build trust
Allow merchants to trust Shopify Logisitics by showing them consistent on-time delivery promises.
Empower merchants
Allowing merchants and Shopify Logistics to take informed actions, quickly based on real and accurate data.
Show reliability
Demonstrate high performance on reliability and speed for merchants.
Insights give merchants more levers, influence and control to run their business better. It also provides Shopify Logistics an opportunity to re-enforce that we're a highly performant 3PL.
OUR OBJECTIVE:
Introduce a way for merchants to be able to access on-time delivery (OTD) today within the unified experience.
This feature will address a top 3 concern for merchants who evaluate fast shipping plans. We need to the ability to demonstrate highly reliable perfomance across delivery speeds, all the time.
Iterating on Deliverr Insights
We recognized the importance of insights and rather than just copying insights from Deliverr Seller Portal, we worked on breaking them down one by one and improving how we present them based on merchants need.
On-time delivery
On-time shipping
Promised delivery speeds
Collaboration is key
Recognizing the significant impact of this project, we made sure to collaborate with designers from various teams across the organization. Our goal was to prevent redundancy in our efforts and to create a valuable experience that benefits everyone involved.
Optimization
The Insights framework will be under the ownership of the Optimization team. However, the team is relatively new and won't address this issue until 2023.
This was an opportunity for collaboration, as we worked together with the team to develop this framework. We were able to determine the most effective way to present insights to merchants that benefits both teams and avoided duplicative efforts.
Core Optimization
The Shopify Core Optimization team has already created a comprehensive analytics page that is currently in use by thousands of merchants.
We collaborated closely with them to maintain consistency and coherence in our designs. Since both features share similarities, we had the opportunity to explore future possibilities for integrating delivery insights into the existing analytics platform.
Returns & Claims
Introducing insights on late deliveries allows merchants to swiftly identify and filter out delayed orders.
This feature was originally on their roadmap, and through our collaboration, we were able to implement it in a V2 iteration. This highlights the value of our discussions with them, as we uncovered this opportunity that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Addressing content
Delivery insights provide merchants a great deal of data and information so they can make informed decisions. They can also lead to merchants interpreting the insights incorrectly without understanding the context. Together, we worked together with content to ensure that we were providing clear copy surrounding the insights
Polaris Viz
Even though SFN isn't part of Shopify Core admin, we must still follow Polaris guidelines. We've ensured our design aligns with Polaris viz, and we've worked closely with the front-end engineer to reuse components for consistency and reduced development effort.
Introducing SFN Delivery Insights
Overview page
We leveraged the existing analytics card from the core to offer merchants quick, high-level on-time delivery insights for their daily use. We made it easy for them to change the date range with a simple dropdown menu and ensured a user-friendly interface that doesn't overwhelm merchants. Additionally, we placed the insights in a location that can be easily relocated based on future framework decisions.
Insights page
Merchants have the option to access more in-depth insights on a dedicated 'insights' page. They can also customize their experience by filtering between different date ranges. We aimed to deliver a familiar experience, similar to what's seen on Deliverr Seller Portal. To enhance decision-making, we've broken down the categories for each insight, allowing merchants to make more informed choices. We've utilized existing components in Polaris-vis for this purpose.
Inventory page
A merchant can click on an inventory item and access a coverage map. This map displays data showing the extent of their coverage in each state and helps them identify areas where adding more inventory could improve coverage. Providing merchants with this information empowers them to optimize their fulfillment and inventory management for an enhanced customer experience.
Merchants feedback
After designing, we reached out to two merchants currently using SFN to get their feedback on what they thought on this new feature and they were excited to started using it.
We had some concerns on how they’d react if they saw a poor performance but it seemed like both merchants understood the scenarios in which that may happened and weren’t too concerned as they trusted Shopify Logistics,
“This will be great- we’ve been asking this for a while. We can’t wait to start using this to monitor OTD performance”
- Merchant 1
“We’ll definitely be using this feature, it’ll stop us from asking John (Merchant Success) every week!
- Merchant 2
The impact
After launch, we worked closely with merchant success to ensure that merchants were enjoying and using the new feature. 85% of merchants were happy with the new addition and were starting to incorporate strategies on how to improve their OTD into their calls with merchant success.
Our learnings
Communication is key
A large portion of time spent on this project was in communication and reaching out with other teams to ensure alignment It was something that didn’t seem like a big deal at first but proved to be the reason why this project was so successful!
Design systems for the win
We spent a lot of time making sure that our designs were consistent with not only Shopify Polaris but Core Analytics as well. Doing this allowed us to reduce dev efforts and changes.
Copyright© 2023 Jane Tran.