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maX Stock Availability
Platform
Web, iOS, Android
Role:
Research, Design
The problem
Stock availability was not transparent or easily accessible to customers. This is resulting in customers placing orders where stock isn’t available in their chosen branch.
Issues that this causes:
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Disruption to customers' workflow
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Alternative products being suggested or delivered
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Items not being delivered
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Phone calls from the branch
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Order transfers
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Delayed or split deliveries
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Distrust in our inventory
Research
Over 3 weeks, many interviews were conducted with customers and branch staff
Key quotes from research
Customer persona
Design
Indicators were created using components from the Google Material Design Guidelines and iOS Human Interface Guidelines to ensure that usability and accessibility were guaranteed.
Customers are able to use smart sourcing engine to transfer order to branch that has entire order in stock.
iOS implementation including utilisation of smart sourcing engine to allow customers to switch order to nearby branch with all items in stock.
Results
Implementation of stock availability resulted in a 280% increase in fully in stock orders from release date (Oct' 22)
Next steps and improvements
Some customers are still placing orders for items that are not in stock, outside of the acceptable threshold for special items. Reasons include:
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Color of the "Available to order" indicator being overwhelmed by the other brighter indicators
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Customers only reading the initial "Available" of "Available to order"
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Customers generally not paying attention when ordering
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A more drastic change had to be made to the product page to convey information, but this could not be solved simply in this page and would need further change in the cart page to capture customers' attention before they placed the order, a final check before they submitted the order.
The images below are concept only as of Sept 2024
To address customers not reading, the CTA of Add to cart would be changed to a secondary button to visually highlight the difference for items that are not in stock and "Available to order in". This would be paired with the change in copy to both set expectations with customers as well as remove the offending word "Available" which is driving the misunderstanding.
Web view - grouping and highlighting of out of stock products that need to be ordered on cart page to alleviate problem of customers not reading stock statuses.