Product Development & Design :: eCommerce Integration
Shipping Protection
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An end-to-end solution for Extend’s newest product offering: Shipping Protection. Shipping Protection is a program that allows customers to purchase a plan to protect their delivery, and merchants benefit from the extra revenue.
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Lead Product Designer to develop the MVP product, then Design Manager to bring the product to maturity
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1 quarter to MVP solution
Presently managing and overseeing product enhancements for mature product
Business Goal
Extend wants to expand its offerings beyond extended warranties into shipment insurance. This type of protection plan gives customers peace of mind that their delivery is safe from theft, loss or damage - while merchants benefit from a new revenue stream.
Challenge
Develop an integrated purchase experience for eCommerce merchants to provide shipping insurance to their customers.
Users
A two-pronged challenge. The product needed to address the needs of Extend’s current (and future) B2B merchant partners as well as provide an amazing experience to online customers.
Competition
Our primary competition: Route.
I led competitive analysis of Route’s offering to help drive initial decisions on this new product experience. Key insights included:
Clarity on the coverage details must take priority
Action for opt-in into or opt-out of this plan must be simple and easy
Route’s offers are heavily route-branded, which clashed with some of their merchant partner’s store branding.
Route’s offer provided an avenue for more valuable plan details via a tooltip, but this was not very obvious at a glance.
Route’s Shipping Protection offering
User Journey
For my recommended user flow, I wanted to ensure that offers appear when relevant, and for the flow to be consistent and flexible for different store structures. Surfacing the offer at the final checkout would be the most relevant location - understanding that the customer is more likely be considering the safety of their shipment. This also provided a lower engineering lift, since the price of the plan is calculated from the total price of the cart, and checkout screens won’t need dynamic calculation of price.
Naming & Branding
With my background in advertising, I was given the opportunity to develop and pitch the name and branding for Extend’s new product.
Since this was the first new program, I wanted to take a systematic and scalable approach to the branding and name of this program. Being a young insurance startup, there is no telling what other kinds of warranties Extend may offer in the future.
Aside from scalability, usability was at the forefront of my final design decisions. Clarity of what was being offered was absolutely key, especially as an upsell that will integrate across dozens of product verticals. The logo lockup must be intuitive and be able to function within the context of an offer as well as be able to scale across modals, websites, and other parts of the Extend platform.
After several rounds of refinement over the course of a sprint, stakeholders approved this “Shipping Protection by Extend”. This toggled offer (left) was approved as our MVP, mainly because of how it reaches parity with our competition.
Push for Optimization
After stakeholder approval, the backend engineering work began. With a week or so before front-end engineering developed the approved MVP, I took the opportunity to take a step back on this design and found several areas of improvement. Although this offer was loved because of it’s parity with Route, I wanted us to differentiate more from the competition in ways that would help make the functionality of this product easier to use and showcase more value to the customer to make a sale.
Redesign
By working quickly and getting rapid feedback from my team, I was able to redesign the original design to an optimized offer.
The refinements accomplished the following to make a stronger MVP product design:
Opting for a ‘checkbox’ UI that felt more intuitive for adding/removing an upsell instead of toggling this purchase ‘on’ or ‘off’. This also is more flexible and will better ensure contrast standards for if the merchant partners customize the color of this action.
Separating the ‘Learn More’ link to create a clearer call to action to view valuable plan details & benefits, as well as ensure the placement can stay consistent when translated for globalization
Separating the price to make the cost more clear for the user, as well as ensure the placement can stay consistent when translated for globalization
Explorations to final redesign
Results
The Shipping Protection product has proven to be an extremely successful revenue stream for Extend. Over 50 merchants have signed and gone live with this offering in 2023, and is proving to be especially desirable in the auto parts space.
Extend’s merchant partners who have implemented Shipping Protection have seen anywhere between a 33% to over 50% average attach rate (% customers who add a plan with a purchase). This equates to north of $100,000/year extra revenue for most mid-market merchants, all while increasing customer loyalty and providing fast resolution when shipments encounter issues.
Customer feedback has also been positive, with opportunities already identified on how the program can improve with shipment tracking and with claims.
In addition…
After launch, I found various areas to own and streamline operations for the company. At a startup, the company’s success often lives and dies on sales and new go-lives. I led initiatives to accomplish the following to continue the success of the product:
Created a fully functional prototype to enable sales to walk through the Shipping Protection experience on calls
Created guides and led exercises for the in-house marketing team to enable them to create mockups of the experience to support sales.
Since most merchants want to explore building a specific program page on their website for offers like Shipping Protection, I also designed and wrote a recommended, brand-able, website template for our partners with pre-approved language to meets legal standards, as well as push the benefits of Shipping Protection to customers.
Created an onboarding guide for future designers
👋 Want to learn more about Extend? Check out Extend.com 👋