eCommerce Subscription Project
Sector: Healthcare/Nutraceutical
The company in the healthcare sector wanted to encourage patient re-ordering and support practitioner protocols by offering a monthly subscription program for their online vitamin supplement program.
Problem Statement
We needed to add an option to allow easy and automatic reorders for a particular product added to the shopping cart. We could not disrupt the current checkout process existing users that were not a part of our target audience.
The eCommerce site was accepting approximately 1,500 orders per day, with a mix of practitioner and direct patient orders.
Users & Audience
- Patient customers ordering daily dose packs (30-day supply)
- 80% over 40 year of age in need of daily supplemental nutrients
- Supplements are recommended by their health care practitioner and under that practitioner’s supervision
Roles & Responsibilities
I assumed the following roles on this project:
- User Experience (UX) Researcher
- User Experience (UX) Designer
- Interaction (IxD) Designer
- User Interface (UI) Designer
- Visual Designer
It was my responsibility to research the existing checkout process and promote the subscription program by offering a small discount for patients that wanted the ease of auto-shipments. The team consisted of myself and one back-end developer.
Scope and Constraints
As this subscription service was not an option for all customers, and was being targeted specifically to patients with a unique product in the cart, placement of the option needed to flow with the existing checkout process as to not interrupt traditional orders. This site was a high-volume ecommerce platform with orders reaching over $250k per day, and over $5 million per month. We had a two-month window to research, design and develop this option. No additional resources were approved and UI needed to remain consistent with the existing checkout process.
Process
My research began with identifying other sites that were growing in popularity and analyzed how subscriptions were offered and at what point in the checkout. Additionally, I spoke with our customer service team members to understand any frustrations they were seeing in the existing program that this offering would be targeting. I reviewed the analytics of the site and documented funnel completion rates as my metric to determine success. Based on my research I designed a large, clear offering in the beginning of the checkout and presented the price after discount and auto-selected this option for any patient with a personalized dose pack in the cart, with a clear option to not allow automatic shipments. A clear notification was also previously visible in the cart before starting the checkout process.
Outcomes and Lessons
The program was very successful, resulting in a 50% higher recurring revenue for the target audience in one month. The program was so successful that we began to build on it, offering the service for more products and audiences. After a year of data, practitioners saw their patient compliance improve drastically and patients on this program 7 times more likely to stay on their practitioner’s health regimen.
