Order management and shipping is a cumbersome daily task for WooCommerce merchants. This future state vision incorporates existing extensions in a new configuration that unifies and streamlines the experience for merchants. This work helped make the business case for investment in a dedicated order fulfillment service.
Product design lead, 2020
The existing store management experience is fragmented. Merchants are required to cobble together many different shipping extensions on top of the core Woo experience for full featured order fulfillment.
From a high level, the future state design assumes a business model (such as subscriptions) for a Woo-owned shipping extension to offer features that would compete with other revenue-generating extensions.
Many of the features and offerings included in these explorations have been identified in research as “blockers to install” the current Woo shipping extension. These include:
Includes a choice of unlimited carriers (via merchant and partnership) and live rates
Integrates packing slip and invoice printing into the offering (with premium access)
Includes bulk printing and from the order list
Accessible shipping settings to improve onboarding
In research on order management, we learned that Woo merchants are confused about what to do next when they receive an order.
In this exploration, the order details screen is redesigned to provide a clear next step to fulfill the order, with secondary actions to print and send invoices and packing slips.
Merchants are able to choose the carrier, packaging, and address information, and print a shipping label for their order.
One of the most requested features by merchants, this exploration presents a concept for bulk fulfillment in Woo.
This exploration envisions how shipping extension settings could integrate with core settings in the future, and make it all easier to understand for merchants.
Based on user research, I explored including premium features in the shipping configuration to enable a subscription upgrade path, such as printing the shipping label together with the packing slip, or adding custom fields to either of those. Other features include:
A visual preview of how the labels will be formatted on their paper with detail text referring to the type of printer
An option to print a test label
The ability to customize both the shipping label and/or packing slip with an order number, company name, logo, etc. (Premium)
An option to date the shipping label as next day after a specified time.
To streamline the label printing process merchants have the ability to set a default location to print labels and skip the print confirmation dialog.
At key moments in the workflow where merchants may find most value from them, premium features are presented with an upgrade path.
A future state concept allows merchants to quickly set up automation for any time-consuming workflows, and any store management task can be done in a matter of seconds.
In this example, the assistant sends a daily notification of any unfulfilled orders, and can be easily prompted to print shipping labels.