GoLemon Misfits is a feature that sells imperfect products to customers at discounted prices, and with clear context about the product's defect.
THE PROBLEM
At GoLemon, one of the stages in the order fulfilment process is quality assurance. At this stage, QA specialists go through orders to ensure that all products meet the QA standards for appearance and safety. Products that fall short are usually flagged and replaced before an order is sent out.
In a lot of cases, products sent back at this stage were usually not bad or unfit for use, but have some defects such as dents, rust, torn packaging or close best-by dates, rendering them unfit for sale to customers. Some of these products were eventually bought by staff, while the majority ended up being disposed.
This meant that almost everyday, the business lost some money due to items like this. Over time, these losses were adding up to become significant.
HYPOTHESIS
Our assumption was that if we could display these products on the app, some users would not mind buying them, as long as;
- We provided very clear context regarding the product's defect.
- We sold them at discounted prices.
To do this, we introduced a new product category called GoLemon Misfits, a place where users could shop imperfect products across all our product categories, from fresh food to toiletries and cosmetics.
GOALS
There were 2 major goals we were trying to achieve with Misfits;
- Give users an opportunity to shop smartly
- Help the business reduce waste and loss.
ROLE
I worked with a product manager and an engineering team across ideation, design, grooming, and QA testing.
FINAL OUTCOMES
Misfit label
We arranged the common product defects into high level groups to form tags. The point of this was that at first glance, users would be able to tell the broad reason why a product was a misfit.
Different misfit labels
Detailed explanation of reason for defect
While each defect was part of a larger group, it was still important to describe a particular product’s defect in more detail. To do this, we added a banner to the product detail page to provide more context about a defect.
Detailed explanation of a product's defect
Product discount flag
We added discount flags to visually communicate the discount as a price slash and also as a percentage
Price slash and percent discount
Deal expiry countdown (for deals that have expiry dates and to create a sense of urgency)
While misfit items were in good condition at the time of listing, for some products especially food items, there was usually a window period between listing the product, and completely removing it from sales (even as a misfit) because they would have gotten to a point were we could not sell them at all. For products like these, we added a deal expiry countdown to communicate this window product, and also create a sense of urgency so that users could pick them up before the deals were off the table.
Deal expiry countdown
Product reservation feature and notifications
Misfit products were usually limited in quantity, and we needed to handle scenarios where multiple people were trying to buy the same items at the same time. To prevent users from adding items to their carts and then being told that it’s no longer available at the point where they were about to pay, we decided to introduce the concept of reservation.
- Communicating the reservation
- The payment countdown
- Showing users an item has been fully reserved
- Notifying users when they have 5 minutes left to pay
We added text to each product modal notifying users that items would only be reserved for them for 30 minutes
We repurposed the “deal expiry” countdown to communicate the amount of time a user had left to pay for a product.
We decided not to remove items that had been fully reserved from the product listing page, to accommodate instances where a user did not eventually pay for an item that they reserved. Instead, we communicated that the item had been reserved, and gave users an option to subscribe for notifications if the product became available again.
We didn’t want to give users the mental load of keeping track of the time they had left to pay, and we also didn’t want to send too many notifications. As a middle ground, we sent one notification when they had ~5 minutes left to pay giving them time to checkout their item before it was removed from their order.
Product reservation and notifications
IMPACT
All misfit items listed on the app sell out within a week. This has helped to reduce business wastage and loss by over 80%.
WANT TO SEE MORE?
Virtual Terminals
Enhancing the in-person payment experience
Design. Usability Testing
Content guide
