FULLSCREEN DIRECT - CART & CHECKOUT

OVERVIEW

Fullscreen Direct was a direct to consumer platform which served 75 major music clients including Metallica, Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake and Keith Urban acting as their direct to fan eCommerce and online fan club service.

The Ask

Given that the industry standard for cart abandonment is 70%, and FSD was clocking around 82%, C-level stakeholders estimated a potential $9 million gain to be realized in optimizing the cart & checkout experience.

Reduce abandoned cart rate from 82% to 70%

Design Questions

In working to answer broad questions about design flaws and optimization, I first set out to answer a set of more specific questions that would help inform design decisions. (slides taken from my executive review presentation)

Design questions included:

• At which major points are people abandoning the cart? 60% drop between add item and start checkout. This exposes the area of greatest opportunity and where to focus. The answer to a related question about how much time it takes the average user to get through each step was not being tracked, but was added to the tech evaluation track.

• What devices are people using? Mobile checkouts are 59%, but the experience was not optimized for mobile: low hanging fruit.

• How many items are people purchasing? Mostly 1 item. Most likely due to the design having a big ‘Checkout’ button on the modal after the user adds to cart. Would not rule out user preference for this type of shopping experience without additional data or AB testing.

• How often are people purchasing pre-orders? It represents 2% of total sales across FSD. Items available for pre-order appear stacked at the top of the screen, pushing all other items down the page.

• Do we track popularity of store items? No, but this can be done and enabled for each account holder. A ‘most popular’ row would be a nice offering instead of the current default of showing pre-orders at the top.

• What is the overall notification strategy? Abandon cart emails, pre-order notification emails, product recommendation emails, newsletter emails, paid media.

• $300 million button: Is there a separate "checkout as guest" flow? Yes, but guest checkout is configurable on a per-item basis.

These baseline questions helped to establish the strategy by which I would tackle the first phase of design. In the presentation, I explained how each response presented an opportunity, but also brought up additional questions. One big one: are we measuring our product in a way that will allow us to evaluate the impact of our updates?

Evaluation of Existing Flow

To get to the heart of the ask, I needed to dissect the cart and checkout flow. I took each step and explained back to the group why a pattern was counterintuitive or where we were leaving a user primed to exit.

One statement I made to the group that resonated and summed up one of the biggest issues with this cart & checkout flow was:

When you go to the grocery store, you don’t put all of the apples in your cart, take them to the checkout lane, and choose your apple in front of the cashier.

Cart and checkout evaluation presentation included opportunity callouts such as:

• Optimizing the order for items displayed on the store landing by a meaningful metric (popularity, featured, etc.)

• Add to cart overlay is a visual barrier to continuing to shop and may contribute to the data we see of customers only purchasing 1 item (Checkout button is the big CTA here)

• Customer should be able to select product preferences (size, color, etc) before the point of purchase

• Not enough user hand holding with dynamic messaging to take them through purchase

• Countdown timers to expire the cart are not being used to create urgency in the right context (tickets, yes; t-shirt, no)

• Error messages persist after correction, they are not dynamic

• No up-sell / recommended item section

Because the FSD platform look and feel was fixed, I delivered a set of detailed wireframes and worked directly with a front end and backend engineer to update the checkout experience.