Optimizing Product Gifting with Shopify Codes
Later Influence (Previously Mavrck)
2024
As social commerce gains momentum, brands are increasingly turning to product gifting as a strategy to drive customer engagement and elevate their social media presence.
Prior to the launch, 90% of prospective users chose not to sign up with Later Influence.
Later's influencer marketing platform lacks a robust product gifting feature, limiting brands' ability to efficiently manage and track these campaigns.
Role
Product Designer
Project Duration
3 Months
Responsibilities
End-to-end Workflow and Strategy
Feature and Roadmap Shaping
UX and Interaction Design
Wireframes and Prototypes
Results
Product Gifting Leads to Brand Growth
HubSpot's 2024 consumer behaviour statistics shows that 64% of Gen Z and 59% of Millennials discover new products through social media, with many making direct purchases through platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Existing customers and lead prospects want to manage product gifting for influencers more effectively, but Later Influence lacks a product gifting feature, resulting in a significant prospect abandonment rate.
To address this, our team tackled on making product gifting intuitive for new and existing customers.
How Product Gifting Impacts Brands and Influencers
Above: Brands rely on back-and-forth management of promo codes in spreadsheets and Later Influence, a pain point causing inefficiencies in operational tasks.
Current workaround for brands is unsustainable
Brands have been using a workaround for product gifting by issuing promo codes for influencers to redeem on the brand’s e-commerce store. The process of tracking, updating, and managing these codes is handled externally, often through spreadsheets, while the rest of the campaign management continues on the Later Influence app.
Brands spend over 60 minutes per campaign on average to create and track products for campaigns
Our goal
Reduce the product gifting task time to 10 minutes
Above: Both brands and influencers would benefit from a streamlined product gifting process.
Influencers receiving products are also impacted
While not our primary users, a manual product gifting process creates friction for influencers too — they prefer a streamlined approach where products can be easily received for the campaigns they are involved in.
The current back-and-forth communication between influencers and brands for product selection and order updates is inefficient
Above: Multi-product selection for a campaign is used, but we found majority of our existing customers have pre-selected products for their influencers already.
Two parts to product gifting
Part 1: Product selection
Influencers can either choose from a range of products, or they get sent a pre-selected product from the brand. Interviews with brand revealed that the latter is a more common use case.
Part 2: Product fulfillment
Brand manages the product from shipment to delivery.
In the MVP, we want to prioritize the product fulfillment portion of the workflow, over the product selection portion, as there are more urgent improvements needed to streamline the complicated process.
Product fulfillment needs to be much simpler.
How do we eliminate or automate some of the product fulfillment steps?
Above: 106/179 current clients use active e-commerce platforms, with Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud being the most popular in terms of current contract value.
E-commerce integration is key
Competitor analysis shows that an e-commerce integration is a standard offering, making it a strategic priority to provide a product fulfillment solution tied to an e-commerce solution.
Over 60% of our customers already use an integration, mainly with Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Given Shopify's 28% U.S. market share, exponential global growth, and versatility across company sizes, it has greater potential to grow alongside Later Influence compared to Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Integrating with Shopify will position Later Influence competitively as a first step
Shopify Codes MVP
Above: The new journey eliminates 7+ manual steps into fewer and simpler steps.
Using the Shopify API, brands can import product data into Later Influence, which generates discount codes for influencers to get products for free and shipped directly to their homes, simplifying the existing product gifting process, and alleviating existing pain points of product fulfillment.
Leveraging influencers' existing mental model of promo codes is strategic
Using Shopify-specific discount codes, it aligns with how users already think and expect product orders to work, reducing overall cognitive load when they're handed the new feature. We can expect influencers to navigate from start to finish without needing too much support.
Short Term Focus:
Deliver an MVP for Shopify Codes
Long Term Focus:
Monitor usage and analyze feedback of the MVP
Decide if we want to expand to a full product catalogue integration for higher tiered customers
Process to Implementation
Above: Early collaboration and feedback to understand technical limitations promotes a smooth workflow during the software development lifecycle.
Anticipating JTBDs and Edge Cases with Third-Party Integrations
I collaborated with developers to outline the key Jobs To Be Done and divided the work into manageable phases. Together, we identified potential oAuth edge cases to address early on to ensure a smoother design and development collaboration. The project timeline was then structured into sprints to provide clear milestones and maintain steady progress.
Above: Ensuring business and user objectives are met helped gave confidence that the rest of the design solutions were going in the right direction.
Receiving Feedback From Other Stakeholders
Before advancing to the remaining phases required for launch, it was essential to gather feedback from external stakeholders, including the sales team and brand partners.
To facilitate this, I prototyped the feature's main happy path. The feedback helped refine the design to meet both key user needs and business objectives, and it ensured alignment and confidence in the solution before moving forward.
Features Launched
Create an incentive
Above: Brands need to fill out a form: the prefix for the personalized code assigned to each influencer, the dollar value, and the applicable Shopify product IDs. This ensures that the generated codes are limited to specific products and a set dollar amount, allowing influencers to order only the products designated by the brand.
Create Shopify codes for influencers
Above: Brands can generate codes for the selected influencers, and confirm the details of the code before they are created.
Mass communicate the Shopify codes to selected influencers
Above: Once codes are generated, brands can add the unique codes by entering a merge tag into the e-mail.
Track influencers' product gifting status
Above: The fulfillment piece is now handled by Shopify, and brands can track the status of the order on the Later Influence app.
Validations and Future Improvements
Impact
Since launch, we've gotten some feedback.
9 existing customers opted in within the first two months post launch
We believe some hesitancy among new customers stems from a few key factors. For instance, the MVP still requires users to rely on the Shopify platform during the initial campaign setup, which may create friction. Additionally, competitors’ product catalogs offer more robust capabilities compared to the MVP at launch. These insights highlight clear opportunities to improve and expand our product offerings, ultimately driving higher activation rates among new clients.
Still, we celebrated a significant milestone that improved our existing users' workflow.
We streamlined product fulfillment on Later, reducing the total time required to complete tasks to just 8 minutes
Reflecting on the Journey
Learnings
Early user testing was necessary for validating the designs and boosting the team's confidence in the project's direction. It reduced bias in our discussions and decision-making, ensuring our approach was driven by user feedback.
Understanding APIs requires technical reading, but it's unrealistic to grasp everything as a designer. Asking questions when unclear was essential. Using visuals like screenshots and flow diagrams helped me clarify my thoughts and frame questions, making team discussions more effective.
What's next?
Continue to monitor usage and value for existing customers.
Depth vs. breadth: Evaluate whether to focus on deeply improving our existing Shopify integration or to expand into new e-commerce platform integrations.
Analyze a product catalogue feature with feature team to expand the offerings.
