Helping customers get the most out of promotions
At Jumbo Supermarkets we pride ourselves on our low pricing. Survey results from Dutch consumer organizations consistently support the claim that we are the most economical choice for everyday groceries. On top of that, we feature lots of different promotions at any given time.
These promotions can be volume-based, like “buy three, pay for two’ or connected to the delivery of groceries ordered online. In that case, ordering specific products will get the consumer a discount on delivery costs or it will even make delivery free of charge.
Discounts and benefits for everyone
There’s a logic behind every promotion. But what may seem logical to us behind the scenes, may not always be clear for consumers. And when they don’t fully understand the conditions, they might miss out on discounts or other benefits.
Pieter van Luijt, Product Owner E-Commerce @Jumbo tells us how he and his team set out to help consumers get the most out of promotions, by looking from their perspective and adding an extra layer of fun to shopping online with Jumbo.
It starts with insights
Pieter: “At regular intervals, we team up with our colleagues from development. We take a deep dive into numbers and data from customer journeys and online orders, trying to find issues or insights, because we always want to optimize for our consumers’ experience. In one of those sessions, we found quite a bit of data that basically told us some consumers did not meet the requirements for certain promotions. They bought too few items to qualify for a discount, for example. Or they ordered different versions of a product, where only one of those versions was featured in the promotion.”
Guided promotions
Pieter then set out to develop ways to guide the consumers to meet the promotion requirements. “We had lots of ideas on how to do that. What we then do is divide them into different concepts, list all the features we would like to implement and then strip the concepts down to realistic and feasible versions to start with.” That touch of realism will help when it comes to implementation, because more features require more time to implement, and resources can be scarce. Pieter: “And you will want to get a first version out as quickly as possible. New features can then be added in new releases based on the first insights of actual usage.
“Part of the process of coming up with ideas is logic. But because we create things for our end users, it also takes empathy and creativity. That’s why we involve consumers to get to the final concept. We pretest our ideas on usability. After that, we start to work on implementing the winning concept. In this way we specifically focus on our service oriented architecture. When it comes to this tool implementations around the (online) promotions and the shopping cart is combined to create the best shopping experience”
A bar and confetti
The team started to work and came up with a tool that appears when a promotion-item is selected. Red tags marking special pricing or other benefits are shown next to these products. But the real useful feature is a bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen. It shows the conditions consumers must meet to qualify for discounts. And it rewards them with a fun little animation when they do. “As soon as the conditions are met, we show some confetti flying around in the bar, signaling their success. It’s a small gesture, but we know people appreciate it”.
A / B testing
When the basic feature is build, we first activate it for 50% of our website users. This way, we make sure that the feature has the intended effect. We then gather and analyze the usage, which leads to ideas to improve. We get to work on implementing these and test each single one of them with 50% of the users. This A/B testing makes sure that the best features are ready for usage online.
Limits and opportunities
What we do is make something that has been around for ages more fun: shopping. The downside is that you can’t really change that concept of shopping, so there’s a limit to what we can think of and do. But on the other hand; people know how to shop. We don’t have to explain any basics and it’s far more challenging to come up with small changes that add up to make a huge difference in terms of fun and usability for consumers.
There’s a slight paradox in what we do. Our team helps people spend as little time as possible of what Jumbo does best: offer a fun and efficient shopping experience. Because grocery shopping is hardly anyone’s favorite pastime, and we would all like to get it done as quickly and easily as possible. And it is up to us to remind our customers that they are buying discount items. In that way, we make sure they won’t miss out on any promotions!
And that’s a challenge you don’t find in many jobs.”
Would you like to join our team? Check out our vacancies