UX Research

Shopify

Shopify is a complete e-commerce platform that lets people start, grow, and manage a business. With Shopify, we can create and customize an online store, sell in multiple places, and manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping.

The Challenge

Our goal in this project is to research and discover the pain points, challenges and problems merchants face while processing incoming orders.

We were two designers in the team, and my role consisted of researching and conducting interviews, looking for relevant information that we would then analyze to find patterns and answers.

The Problem

Shopify has set up initiatives to develop digital tools that help our merchants process their incoming orders more efficiently and get orders out for delivery more quickly. Still, we want to understand why merchants are having trouble incoming their orders and identify how and at what stage of the process the most critical difficulties arise.

The Hypotheses

- Incorrect or poorly coded information. This issue can cause order entry teams to slow down the process by looking for missing information or correcting existing information.

- The teams (or people) that process the orders do not have all the necessary tools, making the process complex and lengthy.

- Lack of knowledge of the operation of the different existing tools for incoming orders offered by the Shopify platform.

The Users

Our search results determined that our clients are small and medium-sized businesses, freelancers, product manufacturers, and product importers looking to Shopify to sell and communicate their products online. They do not have the knowledge or the resources to build their own website with e-commerce and all the development that involves selling online in the most appropriate way since each company has its own needs and challenges.

Multiple teams and people are affected by issues that require immediate improvement:

- Customer service team or those in charge to enter the orders for the production teams that prepare the physical orders.
This team is the one in charge of organizing and validating the information entered and then comparing it with the real inventory as it's not automatically updated by the system/ This generates severe problems in the information of the existing inventory in the warehouse and what is shown on the website.

- Sales teams being compromised with customer complaints when there are inconsistencies or delays in orders

- Customers are harmed when they place orders which cannot be served due to lack of product availability (due to poor inventory), generating frustration and disbelief towards the company.

- Production teams must react quickly to urgent requests due to inconsistencies between the website and actual inventories.

User Satisfaction

Our analysis shows us there is good acceptance on the part of the merchants of the platform, first for how it is friendly to use, the logical steps, and its minimalist interface design. However, the problems related to updating the inventory are a stumbling block for the process of incoming orders and represent a severe risk to the proper functioning of companies and their direct relationship with their customers.

-The Risk-

This issue puts us in a dangerous line where the opportunity will open for the client to consider looking for another solution in the competition other than Shopify, which offers multiple solutions, including inventory tools and tracking orders.

User Interview

Through these interviews, I collected high-quality descriptive and evaluative information that would allow us to understand and discover the difficulties that merchants are experiencing with the order receipt process.

Main Questions

• What products or services (offered by merchants) are more difficult to process?

• How effective are the tools used by the competition to solve the incoming of orders?

• How does the quality and quantity of information coming from consumers affect merchants?

“How Might We”

  • How might we improve the efficiency of inventory management
  • How might we build a solution for tracking online orders?
  • How might we find a solution to update the inventory in the warehouse and website simultaneously?

The 5 ‘Why’s

  • Why are there managers and customer service teams worried?
    - Because the income order process is slow
  • Why does the income order process is slow?
    - Because there are inventory issues in the warehouse and the website
  • Why are there inventory issues in the warehouse and website?
    - Because the inventory does not do daily
  • Why does the inventory not do daily?
    - Because it must to do manually
  • Why must it do the inventory manually?
    - Because the Shopify platform doesn’t have a tool or application for this need

Affinity Map

Using the information gathered in the interviews, I organized a list on sticky notes and then regrouped them into affinity groups. It was exciting to see how the patterns of behaviour were evident! Some things were helpful, and we were closer to the goal.

Problem Statement

After organizing and analyzing our information, we feel ready to write our problem statements.

Problem Statement 1

A customer service assistant who is frustrated about inventory management needs to submit production confirmation orders but faces a platform that is error-prone and not fully automated.

Problem Statement 2

A general manager who is worried about manually tasks, needs to have the inventory updated in warehouse and website , but faces a platform that is inefficient and does not offer any solution.

Problem Statement 3

A customer who buys a product who feels anxious about delivery time needs to do their order tracking but faces an inexistent tool into the website.

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Montréal, Québec, Canada
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