Process and actions

Initially, the team identified the highest impact opportunities, based on customer feedback, competitor reviews and assessing ongoing Redbubble costs. We quickly focused on the opportunities that could empower customers to make changes to their order themselves, especially considering Redbubble’s business constraints of working with third-party fulfillment. 

We then used user journey maps, paired with an internal flow-chart to iterate on the scope and functionality. While working remotely (due to COVID-19 and international offices), these tools were an invaluable way to communicate the planned outcomes and collect internal feedback. Using this approach, we aligned on a scope of allowing customers to cancel their orders within 2 hours of placing their order. See here for an anonymised version of the flowchart:

Typically, Redbubble’s refund policy is focused on issuing customers vouchers for the value of their order. However, we knew that customers generally prefer a refund to their original payment method, and that using vouchers can be a challenge for customers (e.g. customers cannot use a refund voucher and a discount code together). In a world without constraints, the team would have preferred to build a lightweight version of both voucher refunds and direct payment refunds into order to test impact. However, I came to the conclusion that in order to deliver safely before the holiday volumes increased over Black Friday weekend, we did not have enough time to build both.

Ultimately, when considering the four big risks identified by Marty Cagan, the team implemented a solution that would refund customers back to their original payment method. Although this naturally led to some questions about ensuring Redbubble’s revenue is protected (i.e. business viability risk), I calculated that this approach would more than break even financially, given customer’s propensity to re-order shortly after a cancellation.

Outputs

We added the following experiences and technologies to create this product:

• A new post-purchase form to allow most customers to cancel their order within 2 hours of purchase and receive a refund to their original payment method

• A new API to support programmatic order cancellations and refunds

• UI updates to existing experiences (such as the Thanks page and Order Confirmation email) to provide access the form

• A new cancellation confirmation email to provide a record of the cancellation to customers

See screen recording below for a demo.