During my time at Wayfair as a Technical Product Owner, I worked on the Search and Recs team. The largest problem that our team tackled was lowering shipping costs for our customers. It turns out that we were recommending products that would get to customers faster. By using better algorithms, we recommended items from warehouses closer to the consumer. This helped customers get their items faster, at a lower shipping cost and also saved Wayfair millions in service costs.
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*Certain information has been modified due to an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement).
Customer Challenge
Customers of Wayfair frequent the site in order to find the lowest prices for a wide variety of home products, at an affordable cost. The challenge that the customers were facing were that the items being recommended were too expensive and that the time it took to ship to their homes was too high. Below, I'll talk about some of the insights that we got from our customer interviews.
Voice of Customer Interview
High shipping costs
Customers often found shipping costs too high, especially with the advent of other large players in the e-commerce space offering free shipping.
Items being received broken
As Wayfair sells a variety of household items, such as plates, cups, coffee tables, etc, there were customer complaints that their items were arriving broken in transit.
Receiving items late
With a lot of our consumers coming to Wayfair to furnish their new homes or apartments, there was feedback that they wanted to receive their items with a less of a delay, so that they could have their new homes furnished quicker.
User Persona & Customer Journey
Here's the user that we were targeting with our solution.
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User Stories -> Technical Requirements
Solution & Business Plan
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Technical Product Roadmap & Flowchart
