Creating a scalable pickup and delivery experience for online beverage ordering.
Provi is a B2B online marketplace that empowers restaurants, bars, and other alcohol retailers to order from all their wholesale beverage distributors in one place. As a marketplace that supports a wide number of distributors, Provi must be adaptable enough to support a variety of order requirements and parameters, to ensure that orders are placed and fulfilled as expected.
While most distributors deliver products directly to their customers’ establishments, there are exceptions to that rule, particularly for distributors that have direct-to-consumer stores. For those distributors, allowing for in-store pickup is essential to their business model. Provi already had this capability for one distributor, but as we looked to expand our partnerships with other distributors, it introduced new considerations for the pickup and delivery model that didn’t fit well into the original, hyper-specific feature. We needed to create a more scalable solution that would account for the various ordering methods we identified with our other future partners.
As Provi established new partnerships, we needed to scale up our pickup and delivery experience to adapt to different business models.
Because this was a core functional requirement for some of our burgeoning partnerships, the primary objective was to scale the pickup and delivery selection capabilities to adapt to specific distributor models, to enable bringing those new distributors onto the platform. Success for this project was building an experience that would allow us to onboard 3 new major distributors onto the platform.
Success for this project was building an experience that would allow us to onboard 3 new major distributors onto the platform.
From an experiential standpoint, we wanted to focus on reducing the friction in the current experience. We were not looking to influence customer behavior, but rather make the tasks that they already needed to complete easier to do.
As we began coordinating with our new partner distributors, they provided us with user stories relating to their customers’ ordering journeys. We mapped all of these out together, to identify the commonalities and differences between the experiential requirements.
From there, we were able to define the 4 “fulfillment models” (models of how orders are fulfilled, based on inventory sources and available pickup and delivery methods) that we needed to support across all of our distributors. This helped us determine what types of flexibility we needed to consider, to ensure that our solution would scale across all the various permutations of fulfillment models.
We also looked at how the current solution for selecting pickup and delivery for our initial distributor was performing, by looking at the metrics of what methods were selected, and reviewing customer feedback we’d received via the Customer Support team, as well as a survey we sent out to current customers. We found that, while pickup orders only constituted 7.2% of the orders placed for that distributor, we identified several opportunities for improvement:
Cumbersome Selection Process: Retailers must individually select pick-up options for each product within every order, increasing time spent on order configuration.
Disorganized Store Listings: The presented pick-up store options appear in arbitrary order, hindering retailers from making optimal selections quickly.
Limited Post-Order Support: The current system lacks critical functionality to notify retailers when their orders are ready for pick-up, creating operational uncertainty.
Even though these pain points were only affecting a small subset of our current customers, we recognized that these would likely become more prevalent as we introduced other fulfillment method models into the experience.
I paired with two other designers to explore some initial high-level concepts. We primarily focused on defining the appropriate hierarchy and rules of selection. We defined three general approaches, to start:
Seamless shopping: delivery methods are embedded into the shopping flow.
Global setting: Entire shopping experience is centered around your preferred delivery method.
Shop now, decide later: Focus more on the products you want to order and then decide how you want to receive them.
We determined that the "seamless shopping" approach would be best, because the fulfillment method that a customer chooses can impact the availability of the product they’re trying to order, meaning that the product may be in stock at Store A, but out of stock at Store B. Embedding the delivery or pickup selection option throughout the experience allows customers to modify their method as needed, while shopping.
Because we received extensive feedback on the difficulties of modifying the fulfillment method, we determined that it would be best to redefine what the default method was, and how a method persists or is modified throughout the shopping experience.
We decided that the default method should be defined based on what options are available. If delivery is available, that should be the default method. If delivery is not available, the nearest pickup location should be the default.
From there, I mapped out all of the touch points that would need to be considered, and at what level we should present the option to modify the fulfillment method.
I then established the designs for general modifications of the fulfillment method, as well as a treatment for when products are out of stock or unavailable at the selected store or for delivery.
I also updated the fulfillment method selection experience, to organize the pickup location options according to proximity to the ordering establishment, and to display stock status of products in the selection experience, thus creating an experience that is more easily navigable, and has more pertinent information, to help the customer make an informed decision on where to order from.
Another pain point of our current customers was the lack of clarity on when an order is actually ready for pickup. Because there was no explicit notification when the order was ready for pickup, customers were left to assume that the order was ready on the day they selected, but would occasionally show up too early, causing frustration in the pickup experience. We remedied this issue by incorporating a new email to notify customers when their orders are ready.
Unfortunately not all distributors have the means to send us this updated status, but for those who do, this is a significant value-add to their customer base, to alleviate confusion around when to pickup their order.
To validate that this approach would work for our customers, we tested the updates with our existing user base, as well as customers that order from some of our future partnerships. I created a prototype that included some of the more challenging potential scenarios a customer might encounter while trying to order products, such as products being out of stock.
Test Goals:
Validate saving the user-selected delivery/pickup option.
Understand user expectations and actions when encountering out of stock for their selected delivery method.
Gauge retailer understanding of the selected method persisting through the experience.
Understand what touch points are necessary in the cart for modifying their fulfillment method.
Findings:
Our placement of the fulfillment method modification was easily locatable and intuitive to our customers in most scenarios.
Customers appreciated seeing the distance from their business, when deciding on a pickup location.
Customers understood and expected their fulfillment method selection to follow them throughout the experience.
View the full test prototype below.
The feature will soon be released for our existing distributor partner, which should offer a helpful comparison for before and after the updates. The 3 additional distributors are still in the process of onboarding to Provi, but are slotted to be released in 2025.
