Stitch Fix Shipping & Payment

Previously, our customers couldn’t change their payment method or shipping address during the Freestyle direct shopping checkout flow without leaving the checkout process. They had to navigate to account settings outside of Freestyle. Sometimes they realized the order was sent to the wrong address or charged to the wrong payment method after submitting the order. Stitch Fix was receiving 325 customer support tickets related to shipping and payment methods per week. Our goal was to increase customer satisfaction and reduce customer support tickets related to shipping and payment.

Skills

UX design, product strategy, agile development, QA testing

Ideation & Sequencing

The product manager extracted user stories out of the customer support tickets. Initially we took a phased approach and considered a low-effort inline option to change the address for phase 1. This would allow customers to change the shipping address. We would add the option to add separate shipping addresses or payment options and set an address as the default in phase 2. We considered address and payment method management in Account Settings, but this was low priority because the need to change an address or payment method only arises during checkout.

During quarterly planning and discussions, the expansion and payments engineering teams raised a feasible bad actor scenario: a bad actor accesses the account and changes the shipping address, shipping orders to their own address. It became clear that we had to revalidate the payment method (CVV for credit cards, reauthentication for 3rd party payment methods) as part of phase 1.

A common scenario that came out of the user stories was that if the customer didn’t have access to the card anymore, they needed to be able to add a new one. Given that address validation required that we store the address, the heavy lift for phase 2 would already be mostly done.

Design & Development

This project required comprehensive designs across web and iOS and close collaboration with three engineering teams: the web expansion team, payments team, and iOS team. The web team split into a shipping and payment team to parallelize the development work. It was particularly fun creating a QA plan and thoroughly testing all the different scenarios to achieve an airtight, bad-actor proof experience.

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