Global store - Brexit
Bridge the gap between German and UK and minimize the impact of Brexit on customer experience in both locals
Background
This project focused on bridging the first gap between Germany and the UK, the two largest marketplaces in the EU, enabling 85k product selections in UK and 4.5 million in German. With the new border post Brexit, the previous retail customer experiences in the EU 5 countries, including the UK, Italy, German, France, and Spanish, were heavily impacted because these marketplace selections consist of the domestic selections and the selections from the other EU 5 countries. Post-Brexit, the product selections were reduced drastically, and the new border changed the shipping speed, free shipping benefits, customs, and overall item price.
My role
Led the design and launched the UK and German Global Store end-to-end shopping experiences and increased product selections for locals in collaboration with cross-functional teams and senior leadership.
Worked with 2 PMs, 1 SDM, 15 developers, and 3 QAs.
What I did
• Define the scope of work, use cases, the design timeline
• Flash out end-to-end shopping experiences
• Data analysis
• Executive presentations with senior leadership
• Collaborate with cross-function teams, including legal team, country lead, search, detail page, cart, and checkout.
• Fostering relationships with partners
Impact
Enable 4.5 million purchasable items in German and 85K items in UK.
Increase $412.88 million revenue post launch.
Addressing one customer frustration under Global Store regarding the inclusive pricing.
The challenge
• Define all use cases
When designing the end-to-end experiences, I consider not only Prime but none Prime. I also need to consider all the possible variables, including Import Fee Deposit, delivery speed, shipping threshold, Item types, and other global store branch experiences. So each variable will result in Exponential growth for all potential use cases.
• Manage Dependencies
Manage expectations and dependencies from upper and downstream design teams. Communicate and collaborate with cross-functional teams such as search, detail page, and the cart to get their design pattern and get design sign-off through office hours.
• Drive leadership alignment
Getting design alignment by all stakeholders, including inside org leadership, legal teams, and country managers by running design review, all use cases read out, manage comments and new requirements, etc.
• Manage timeline
Work under a tight timeline.
Project timeline
Define design goals
• Retaining existing customer experiences for the UK and German customers by closing the gaps post the Brexit with domestic retail experiences.
• Provide clarity to the end-to-end shopping journey
• Provide help content to clarify customer confusion.
• Address known customer frustrations.
Define design goals
Define all touched pages
Define all delivery promises on search result
I spoke with the domestic search design team to get the design guidelines for the delivery message on the search result and work with the copywriter to finalize the copy for the delivery promises. The shipping threshold for none Prime use cases, also keeps the message consistent across all global store branches.
Consolidate existing customer frustrations for Import Fee Deposit on the detail page
• Customers were frustrated by not seeing total costs, like shipping, tax, and delivery fees, where they expected them. Competitors were more transparent about this.
• Customers were surprised when seeing the higher price at checkout.
• Customers were confused when seeing the item price, with shipping/import fees next to it. They weren’t sure if those added fees were already included in the overall item price or if they were additional.
Discover detail page edge cases
When thinking about the detail page, the item price and item type will affect the delivery promise. After speaking with the detail page team, I understood it and ran many tests to understand the logic behind it. So for UK customers, there are two separate free shipping thresholds: one is for books, and one is for none book products. I need to consider for both use cases what delivery promises we need to give to the customer and whether we need to provide clarity on why these books share the different shipping thresholds under the detail link.
Visualize UK none Prime single item cart and mix cart use cases
For cart use cases, the use cases multiplied especially when customers have a mixed cart. Think about the shipping threshold; when the cart composition is different, the shipping message will differ depending on the item value and item types, adding additional complexity when implementing the design.
End-to-end shopping experience
Live experience
Few take-aways：
• Working backwards towards the launch date. Propose a better working process, especially for getting alignment when the timeline is really tight. Drive alignment typically takes the most time, especially since stakeholders are from different organizations. Setting the approval process ahead of time and keeping all parties posted on project progress will reduce communication and discussion time so that stakeholders have context and specific agenda to discuss during the alignment meeting.
• Open to pushback, over-communication, and rework; all parties wish things to work and have concerns; the designer should consider them all.
• Seeking help when things go off the road or running into obstacles, people around you will help when you need it.
• Detail-oriented. Make sure to triple-check on any design files that need to be sent to other people; it will tremendously reduce the communications if your files have mistakes.