SEE Shop was Sealed Air’s first go at an e-commerce experience. Historically, all purchases from our distributors was a high-touch process. All orders, updates and interactions were via email with Customer Service. Sealed Air wanted to see if it was possible to move these distributor buyers to an online experience and it was! Scroll through to read more but within 1 year, 1 billion dollars worth of transactions passed through SEE Shop.
Objective:
Create a tool that would allow our distribution partners to buy Sealed Air products online, reducing the load on Customer Service and increasing the buyer’s visibilty to the order fulfillment process.
What I did:
- Collaborated with a consultant team for research. This included journey maps, process flows, and personas.
- Created the interaction designs and the UI that were reviewed with the team and then sent to development. Due to an intense timeline, I was unable to first make wireframes.
- Created prototypes and test scripts to test with distributer buyers we wanted to onboard. I had frequent contact with a select few distributors that had shown great interest in what we were building.
- Worked hand-in-hand with Customer Service to understand what customers were ideal candidates for adoption.
- Monitored user interactions via HotJar, and then Full Story, regularly. With this, I was able to identify bugs in the code and also assemble user statistics that I presented to leadership.
Once the initial research was complete, the consultant team left and in a matter of weeks, I was asked to take that research and spin up the end-to-end experience. There was no time for wireframes nor was there time for testing. The product was being custom built by our in-house development team and it had to be launched ASAP. I worked with our product owners and customer service team to build the experience and UI.
SEE Shop did the following:
- Provided a ship-to / sold-to banner that was ever present throughout the experience. Having the correct combination dictated pricing, product availability and shipping, so it was important the user could see it and access it at all times.
- Allowed for Quick Order. Many buyers work off a list of products that have product numbers attached, Quick Order let them input numbers quickly without browsing through the Product Catalog.
- Gave order visibility via Order History. No visibility into progress of orders was a big complaint. Now, users could regularly check the status of their order and re-order anything in the past. Repeat orders were a common occurrence.
- Allowed for further refinement in Check Out. Users could easily add items to their cart without leaving the page. Removing items and adjusting quantities was also just a click of a button.
In spite of the product being built so quickly, we received very positive feedback from the distributors that we onboarded. Once the site was launched, we leaned heavily on our users to test and verify how features were or were not working. I also frequently used Google Analytics and HotJar to see how they were interacting with the site.
Within a couple months SEE Shop brought in millions of dollars in revenue online and within the year achieved $1 billion. Due to the hastiness of the product build, however, we found ourselves unable to make feature / UI improvements as the code was riddled with bugs and our developers were constantly fixing things to keep our customers online. After about a year the business was convinced that e-commerce was successful but we could not rely on the current system to grow at the rate the business required. From here, we shifted our priority to MySEE aka e-commerce 2.0.
Hali Diaz 