Mark P.

Product Designer

Gift With Purchase Case Study

In 2018, Macy's began a study into cart abandonment. There was an average of 60% to 75% abandonment rate depending on time of year and also heavily around promotions. A few main questions came from this study. Why were the customers not converting, and what could be done about it.

While digging through metrics a pattern arose in a particular funnel path. The Gift With Purchase flow. This path showed customers abandoning purchases at a rate above 80%. Simultaneously, this avenue showed to have higher traffic than other FOB (Field of Business).

What is Gift With Purchase

Gift with purchase is a promotional, limited time offering based on many key factors. Below are some examples.

  • Product Driven: Buy any Beauty Product (fragrance/makeup/lotion etc) and receive a gift

  • Brand Driven: Buy any item from Brand X and receive Y gift

  • Threshold Driven: Spend $xx.xx and receive a gift

Understanding the problem

In order to fully understand why the GWP flow had such a high rate of abandonment we partnered with the CX team (customer experience) as well as UX research teams.

Previous GWP flow

With the help of our CX and UX research partners we polled several customers on their engagement with the GWP funnel and found several opportunities to improve upon and help reduce the abandonment rate as well as increase overall conversion.

Customer Pain Points

Navigation

  • Duplicate GWP options on results page and redundancy in display

  • Finding GWP options is difficult

  • Confusing flow between GWP options and their eligible products

  • Confused if the gift option is a product that you add to bag

Exclusions + Availability

  • It is not clear how to add a GWP to the bag

  • GWP exclusions confusing (why is this item not added to bag if i am over the threshold

  • GWP online stock availability

Research Interviews

When customers were interviewed about their GWP experience it began to be more clear on why there was such a high abandonment rate and why so much confusion when going down this path.

To access the GWP flow one had to navigate to the Beauty FOB then access the GWP subdirectory. Upon landing on this page you would be greeted with a list of products. These products were the eligible products you would purchase in order to qualify for the free gift.

What we learned was a majority of the customers that were interacting with the GWP online experience were also familiar with the in store experience. These customers viewed this, and shopped in a totally different manner than how the original layout was designed.

In the in-store experience customers would decide which Gift item they wanted, and then shop for the qualifying product in order to get that specific gift. This was the key revelation we needed to meet our KPIs.

Old GWP Browse grid

Solutioning

With Research teams and Customer experience teams weighing in we began to prototype some possible solutions. Research teams recommended a 2 phase approach in order to better understand the impact of the changes. Phase 1 focuses on improving the existing flow with minimal back end changes. This was also recommended by the development teams. Once that was iterated on we moved on to phase 2 which was a complete and holistic rewrite of the customer journey. Based on our research we made changes to improve the efficiency of the customer experience, such as moving the gift section earlier in the funnel and other radical approaches.

Proposed GWP Solution

In the proposed solution we took the in-store model as a starting point. We gave the customer the ability to view the Gift offers at the top of the flow. From there the customer would be able to go to the Gift Display Page to see any details about the gift, such as any requirements to redeem the gift item. From this page the customer would then select to view qualifying products for this gift. This would include a threshold progress bar relaying to the customer how far from completing the requirements they were to receiving their desired GWP product. Depending on the conditions of the GWP, customer would add 1 or multiple products and be given the opportunity to check out along the way, all the while keeping them informed with relevant information necessary to accomplish their primary task. On check out the purchasable product would be highlighted as well as any linked GWP products in a clean easy to understand layout.