Foodkick Product Replacement

The Problem

Launched as a subsidiary of FreshDirect LLC in 2016, Foodkick is an delivery service that provides fresh food, booze, snacks and household items for customers in as little as one hour. As the service grew, one stubborn problem for both the business and customer experience is a term known as ATP (available to promise) fails. An ATP fail is when a customer puts an item in their shopping cart but by the time they check out, inventory data refreshes and lists the item as unavailable because stock sold out in the time the item was stored in a customer’s cart. Because Foodkick provides speciality foods at low supply like fresh baked good and Doughnut Plant donuts, the likelihood of an ATP fail is much higher than other delivery business’ inventory is reliant on CPGs. This created a frustrating checkout experience for the user where they would learn that certain cart items were unavailable to purchase after trying to place their order which is both a terrible user experience and an less-than-ideal scenario for merchandise forecasting.

The Process

For this endeavor, speed was at the utmost importance for the client. I leaned on my ability to use my UX eye and best practice while updating the design along with collaborating with the client and using feedback on the business side to weigh important design decisions such as creating a feature tour using Inline Manual, a SASS product for companies to create coach marks, tool tips and feature tours with built in analytics. While the user research for this initial sprint was lighter than I had hoped, I still was able to conduct guerrilla user testing sessions with friends, family and fellow designers who would actually use the product at their companies. We were also able to utilize feedback from trade show product demos with potential clients to refine the product. After creating design concepts based on feedback and my sessions with the client, we would introduce tech as soon as possible to weigh in on the feasibility of concepts through LOE documentation.

The Result

This feature outperformed our initial KPIs! The original goal was to limit ADP failure rate from 18% down the 10% range. This feature currently brought failure rates all the way down to 7%, creating many more product replacements by customers earlier in the user flow which enhanced our merchants’ ability to properly forecast inventory in order to limit future out of stocks rates for popular items. Win-win for the user and business! The project was so successful that the current plan is to migrate this feature over to the FreshDirect store so many more customers can receive this improved experience.