MEC: Browse in-store stock

Role: Sr. Manager, Product & UX
Core Team: Product Manager, UX/UI Designer, Front-end dev

The Problem

One of our Ecommerce team pillars for the year was “Omnichannel Leadership” - which focused on supporting our customers however and wherever they want to shop.

We identified a potential improvement with an existing feature on mec.ca allowed customers to browse by products that were available in a store of their choice. The customers who used it converted at 20%, but only 1.5% of customers used it.





 

The Hypothesis

If we make the “Available in store” feature more prominent on our product listing pages, then more customers will find and use it, increasing conversion rate and store pick-up %.

Approach

1. Objectives & Success Metrics

Objectives

  1. Increase visibility of the “Available in Store” feature

  2. Increase customer engagement:

  3. Drive higher conversion rates by making it easier for customers to find and purchase products available for store pickup

  4. Encourage more customers to use store pickup

Success Metrics

  1. Usage Rate
    Increase usage from 1.5% to 5%

  2. Feature Conversion rate
    Maintain or increase current conversion rate of 20%

  3. Store pick-up percentage
    Increase store pickup percentage from 30%

  4. Customer Satisfaction
    Gather feedback on the usability and accuracy of the feature
    High satisfaction rate above 80%

 
 

2. Initial Research

We looked at competitors, and researched best practices to understand what experiences our customers may be expecting:

  • Toggles and checkboxes to drive engagement

  • Use product listing pages to make the feature more visible

  • Filters help with clutter but are less obvious

  • IP detection for quick store selection

 

3. Concepting & Iterating

We focused first on generating A LOT of different concepts to avoid getting stuck in ideas we were already familiar with.

We then used quick, single task, unmoderated usability testing to help us narrow down the concepts - and rule out ideas that had more obvious usability issues

4. AB Testing

We developed and rolled out two variations to our current experience using Google Optimize:

  • The test was run for 2 weeks, ensuring we captured enough data to account for variability in sale prices, and shopping behaviors over the week / weekend.

  • Traffic was split mostly equally among the three groups (Control, Variant A, and Variant B). A slightly larger percentage was allocated (34%) to the control to ensure we have a strong baseline of data to compare.

Initial Results

VARIANT A - was the winning variant
Engagement increased by 33%, which is a huge improvement but not yet reaching our goal of 5% usage
Conversion rate increased slightly by 45 basis points (20% to 20.45%)
Customer feedback indicated that the toggle was more easily noticeable than the tabs and the filters.

Iterations

To further increase engagement, we tested using pick-up timelines to entice users to act. We know our customers have high expectations for store pick-up timelines.

We adjusted the wording to say “Next day pickup” at {Store Name} and ran an additional test against the original Variant A
This not only increased engagement another 5%, but due to the compelling pick-up timelines, it increased conversion rate as well by 8.4%
However, the new wording was confusing for some. Many of our customers used the toggle to check in-store stock before going in store to try them on and buy. The new wording had customers second guessing.

Next Steps
Find a balance between pickup timelines and feature purpose

 

Learnings

  1. We were highly focused on driving sales for e-commerce, which made us look past the in-store use cases.
    Learning: Bring in store stakeholders to ensure this perspective

  2. We tried to communicate a lot in a very small space, which led to layout issues. French in particular was a challenge.
    Learning: Moderated testing once the feature went live would help with understanding the most critical information to show

  3. Inventory inaccuracy caused frustration for customers who went in to stores only to find the item wasn’t available
    Learning: You can provide low stock messages, but nothing can replace a reliable inventory counting.