Shift.com is an e-commerce platform that makes buying and selling cars feel easy, trustworthy, and fun. But it didn’t used to be that way.
Despite the positioning as a stress-free online car buying experience, customers found it just as bad as an old-school dealership.
Operations too heavily on sales advisors using inefficient processes and questionable dealership tactics. The few online portions were inadequately designed and written. This led to an overall hostile experience that converted low and canceled high.
OBJECTIVES
• Transform checkout into a delightful and trustworthy online experience
• Expand gross profit per unit via new operational efficiencies (OKR #1)
• Increase financing rates and protection plan sales (OKR #2)
• Align to UX best practices, industry trends and consumer expectations
APPROACH
Over several major releases and iterations, my team and I transformed the process into a profitable, best-in-class customer experience – starting with the overall checkout flow and working our way through each of the main components within.
MY ROLE
• Led UX content and strategy across this multi-phase endeavor
• Drove organization-wide adoption of a content-first mindset
• Partnered with product, engineering, sales, finance, and leadership at various stages to ensure progress toward our goals
IMPACT AND OUTCOMES:
Project Scope
Given the complexity of redesigning a car-sized purchase process, this case study covers five of the six main tentpoles:
1. Reserve Page
2. Main Buyer Dashboard
3. Onboarding/Level-Setting
4. Protection Plans Task
5. Order Tracking
The final tentpole is the Financing Application, which we’ll cover in a separate case study.
Reserve Page
Imagine going on a first date, and the first thing your date wants to talk about is marriage. You’d probably find that a little off-putting, right? That’s what Shift was inadvertently doing: asking customers to fully commit, far too early.
Users had to pay a $250 deposit just to begin checking out. The original goal of this paywall was to filter out low-intent leads, but it filtered out everyone else as well.
Customer support data showed a lingering uncertainty over whether a car might be sold to a “faster” customer while they’re still completing their purchase. So, we addressed this concern and the main problem in one by eliminating the deposit and reframing the page as a reservation to ensure it wouldn’t be sold out from under the customer’s feet.
Old Deposit Page:
New Reserve Page:
Dashboard
This is where the bulk of the purchase happens. Shift utilized a hub-and-spoke model compared to the more linear checkouts of competitors for operational reasons.
We improved and streamlined every interaction, established a clear hierarchy, and Saganized the content and strategy from top to bottom. We then ran multiple user tests to refine and iterate.
Old Dashboard:
WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?
• Lack of instruction, task priority, or purpose
• No indication of timing or progress
• User-hostile language, tone
HOW DID WE KNOW?
• Analytics, heat maps
• User interviews, surveys
• CX emails, call logs, chatbot transcripts
New Dashboard:
IMPACT
• 44% increase in completion rates
• Significant improvements in user perception, confidence and trust in the quality of the experience
Post-Purchase Testing Results:
Onboarding and Purchase Timer
Cognitive fatigue happens fast with a purchase process this big, so it’s vital to make it feel like the end is in sight.
Ongoing testing showed customers were still unsure about what to expect and began to lose steam before finishing their tasks. This caused purchase times to balloon, forcing sales advisors to prematurely intervene. We addressed the problem with set of onboarding screens and a 1-hour time limit to drive urgency.
Onboarding Flow and Timer:
IMPACT
Completion rates increased from 44% to 84%, with a 12% drop in low-intent users
User Testing Results:
Protection Plans Task (Improving Add-On Revenue)
Expanding Gross Profit per Unit was our top OKR, as the company had been fighting to reverse a -5% QoQ decline.
Getting users to attach add-ons (vehicle protection plans) during checkout was the key to reversing the trend and improving operational efficiency. Only 1 in 4 customers even know what protection plans are before they start shopping, so the new Protection Plans task had to educate and convert the user in one go. We accomplished this by:
• Starting with a couple onboarding screens to set the scene
• Adding a brief questionnaire about the user’s driving habits
• Using the results to personalize their plan offerings
• Providing more info with the right tone and level of detail
• Building a more nuanced version of this into the financing application (more on this in a separate case study)
Old Task:
New Task:
IMPACT
Combined efforts of my team plus others increased gross profit 43% YoY for two years and boosted F&I sales by 200%
Order Tracking
The “Order Status” tab on the old dashboard offered little for actually tracking your purchase. This led to a high volume of inbound “dude, where’s my car?” phone calls, further hampering sales staff efficiency.
Our new order tracking view showed where the car was at every stage. I partnered with the Fulfillment Operations team to develop order status labels and descriptions that were meaningful to customers, consistent with internal fulfillment statuses, and aligned with UX best practices (Baymard, NN).
New Order Tracker:
User Testing Results:
Conclusion
Seeing our collective efforts come to life was exhilarating, and I’m proud of the many initiatives I led to achieve this outcome. Just as we turned our gaze to road ahead, a new behemoth was already rushing into view.
Under the hood, we had built a highly adaptive platform capable of rapidly reconfiguring in the event of a sudden full-scale pivot… which then happened twice (omni-channel sales, then a marketplace model).