Self-serve packaging

 

BACKGROUND

Merchants who were using Shopify’s Fulfillment Network to automatically fulfill and ship their orders, sometimes had specific packaging requirements that were not considered “out-of-the-box” offerings from the network’s model. In order to request custom packaging rules for their goods, merchants would have to spend a lot of time with SFN Support representatives since these preferences were only controllable by internal teams. If the merchant wanted to make a change at any point to their packaging requirements, they would need to reach back out to the Support team to do so.

Around the time that this became a larger issue with the number of merchants requesting specific packaging requirements, Shopify had acquired the company Deliverr. Deliverr provided their merchants with the ability to make changes to their packaging in their platform on their own at any given time. Our team was tasked with understanding how we could provide merchants the same kind of autonomy in SFN, thus saving everyone time.

 

ROLE | DURATION | TEAM

Sr. Product Designer @ Shopify

Oct 2021 - Jan 2022

My team was made up of a product manager and 6 software engineers.

THE CHALLENGE

In order to allow merchants to change their packaging preferences on their own there were a few requirements we needed to ensure were met with the new process we put forward. The warehouses were equipped with specific packaging materials and followed a strict set of processes to safeguard efficiency and accuracy with order fulfillment. The packaging materials that were available to use were the following:

  • Polybag or bubble mailer

  • Cardboard box

  • The merchant’s own packaging they provided. The merchant or the supplier would send the product in the packaging it would be sent out to a customer in, therefore it rarely required any additional packaging when the warehouse employee was getting it ready to be sent.

Additionally, when merchants were adding products to be fulfilled by SFN, they needed to answer a set of questions about the product to identify if it was something SFN could fulfill or not. One of the questions they were required to answer was if the product was deemed fragile or not. If they marked that the product was fragile, we would ensure the product was always shipped in a box and not a polybag/bubble mailer. If merchants needed packaging other than a polybag or bubble mailer, they needed to be made aware that there was going to be a an additional cost associated with the packaging selection. In some cases, either due to the additional cost or lack of awareness, merchants would not mark a product as fragile or not update the Support team that their product needed special packaging and orders would be delivered damaged. To avoid this from happening, Support representatives wanted a way to recommend that merchant’s change their packaging preference to ‘fragile’ or that it automatically was updated for them.

THE APPROACH

We took the time to identify the existing interfaces merchants had available to them as it related to packaging materials. Below is an audit of the experience of adding products to the Shopify Fulfillment Network, specifically checking for eligibility which covers whether a product is fragile or not.

Due to the fact that there was already an area on the product details page indicating whether a product was fragile or not, we decided to leverage that component but enhance it for the growing needs of merchants. We explored multiple design options for exposing the packaging options for a product (see Options A-D below) and ultimately decided to use illustrations to convey the differences of packaging materials to the merchants. We chose to show these illustrations in a modal so that they wouldn’t distract too much from the other components on the product details page, but made sure to still make the component which let you edit the packaging look more interactive than before.

CONCLUSION

With the new ability to select packaging options on each product page, merchants were able to self-serve their preferences at any time they chose, without having to speak to a Support representative. This proved to save time for both merchants and our internal teams. The follow up project was going to be to allow merchants to make changes to packaging preferences in bulk but the efforts on this initiative were paused due to organizational changes.