Behind the scenes of a ShopRunner same-day delivery order

ShopRunner is known for free 2-day shipping across a network of 100+ online stores. In 2019, we began exploring how we might take our membership to the next level by offering free same-day delivery. One year later, we launched with two alpha partners—Saks Fifth Avenue and American Eagle Outfitters. Same-day delivery is free for ShopRunner members and now available in over 50 cities nation-wide.

This video is pulled from two separate presentations I gave during company all hands meetings in 2019 and 2020. Hopefully it gives a good overview of the product from concept to launch.

Discovery Research

While the demo above takes the shopper’s point of view, in fact, our research and design work focused primarily on the needs of our brand partners. We conducted several rounds of discovery research in order to understand how retailers think about same-day delivery and where it might fit into their larger fulfillment systems.

The user interviews included representatives across digital marketing, supply chain, and store operations, covering questions like “How has the pandemic impacted your in-store pickup and delivery options?” and “Have you ever discussed launching a same-day delivery program?”. We then used the second half of our interviews to gather feedback on different feature ideas.

Our discovery research influenced the product strategy in several major ways:

• We prioritized making our internal delivery tracking portal available for our partners’ customer service teams.
• With a new appreciation for the brand sensitivity of our partners, we created a white-label version of our post-purchase communication.
• In response to the increased ecommerce demand and subsequent shipping carrier capacity limits caused by COVID-19, we expanded how we sell our capabilities to include local and next-day.

Visualizing the product

The majority of our same-day offering is somewhat invisible. The brand’s website reaches out to our APIs to check location and product eligibility, and their in-store software similarly sends a request when the package is ready for courier pickup. From a customer experience perspective, ShopRunner only controls the post-purchase communication, which can be customized to fit the brand’s look and feel.

For all of these reasons, our typical sales slides were failing to communicate what exactly the product was. To help the sales team, we created this interactive overview in Figma.

This research and prototype were done in close collaboration with Natalie Orcutt and Chris Elipas.