Rebecca Shapiro

Crafting a 3-year product strategy for Zulily

The business problem

Zulily is an e-commerce site specializing in flash deals and great discounts on products loved by moms across the US.

When I joined Zulily in 2020 to lead their UX practice, years of over-optimizing for Facebook marketing, decreasing product quality, and a reluctance to conform to ecommerce norms like search, navigation, timely shipping, and standardized product data meant Zulily was increasingly unable to keep customers past their first purchase.

Data showed us we were no longer appealing to our target customers: mothers of young children, or “Early Stage Mom”.

New research: Who is Early Stage Mom?

My team conducted new research to understand the Early Stage Mom of today, as her behaviors, expectations, and needs had changed since the company first launched 11 years prior.

See details and insights

Methodology

• 280 survey respondents
• 20 unmoderated study sessions
• 10 moderated “shopalong” interviews

What we learned

01 / Early Stage Mom is a digital native

She expects online experiences to “just work” and when they don’t, unlike her predecessors, she doesn’t blame user error, she blames us. 

02 / Trustworthiness is determined by:

• Brands she’s familiar with at prices she expects
• Customer reviews that seem honest and relatable
• An easy returns program

03 / She defines “quality” as a combination of durability and style

04 / She mostly shops on mobile, in short, sporadic bursts throughout the day

05 / She gets inspired by influencers on Instagram and TikTok

06 / She’s socially and environmentally responsible

She’s quick to stop shopping with companies whose actions she disagrees with

07 / She’s a serious comparison shopper

She’s quick to go to other sites if she can’t find the products or answers she’s looking for on ours.

08 / She has a “classic,” “classy,” “more refined” style

Our products and site weren’t matching her tastes.

Ultimately, we learned that our current experience was no longer meeting her needs. We needed a new strategy.

Introducing… “Design the Future”

A collaborative UX-led 2.5 day brainstorm and “design-a-thon” with 51 remote participants across UX, PM, Engineering, Internal Tools, Data and Machine Learning, Marketing, Creative, and Merchandising.

Our Tenets

• Shopping on Zulily should feel like walking into a clean, organized, well-lit storefront.

• We anticipate Mom’s wants and needs and remove any friction that gets in her way.

• We open up new paths to discovery, giving her new ways to organically discover great new products to love.

• We make it easier for Mom to feel confident about her purchasing decisions and reduce her risk of shopping regret.

• We recognize that the young Mom of today and tomorrow is a mobile-first digital native. She is a treasure hunter who enjoys the thrill of the find, but wants to make sure her time and money are well spent and ethically spent.

Seven cross-functional teams came up with new, user-centered solutions to better meet the needs of our target customer AND make it easier for our vendors and merchants to meet those needs.

The pitched concepts

Teams collaborated on high-level concepts that they pitched to senior leadership on the final day of the event.

See the concepts

01 / Redesign search to be both functional and inspirational.

02 / Introduce organization to sales event pages, category pages, and the homepage

03/ Rethink product detail pages for clarity of information, with customized information architecture by product type

04/ Redesign customer reviews to include images and videos

05 / Incorporate shoppable and inspirational authority-building editorial content into the shopping experience

06 / Hassle-free returns that don’t require a printer or a trip to the post office

07 / Streamlined, self-service onboarding for new sellers on the site

We tested, socialized, and iterated on these concepts and created a refined, cohesive vision for the future of Zulily that I presented to the entire company.

The vision: A new Zulily for a young mom

(Click on each video for a quick demo)

Outcome and impact

Our 3-year vision became THE company strategy for how to resonate with early stage Mom.

I led authorship of our 2022 Shopping Experience Product Plan based on this vision, which featured prioritization of the following initiatives for that year’s roadmap:

• Completion of Homepage redesign
• Completion of Checkout redesign
• Product page redesign, customized by product categories
• More robust product details and images from vendors
• Redesigned search with improved functionality
• Shareable wishlists
• Improved reviews experience
• Improved returns experience

Beyond the shopping experience, I met with cross-functional leaders across the company who committed to parallel efforts to better meet the needs of our users, such as improving merchandise selection and product quality, building stronger relationships with influencers, and streamlining internal tools to make it easier for small businesses and vendors to onboard their products onto Zulily.

Impact numbers from our initial launch phase at the end of 2021:

• Homepage improvements: +$25M in topline demand
• Search improvements: +$6M in topline demand
• Redesigned checkout: +$4.2M incremental demand
• Incremental reviews improvements: +5% reviews coverage