CASE STUDY

Onboarding Wayfair Business members

Overview

Wayfair Business (now Wayfair Professional) is an exclusive program for users shopping for a business. Benefits of the program include exclusive pricing, a dedicated account representative, and access to a larger catalog of products.  In my role as Senior Product Design Manager at Wayfair, I worked with the B2B marketing and product teams to rethink the registration experience and design system for the program in 2016.

To sign up for Wayfair Business, users needed to prove that they are shopping for a business.  This verification process started on the program's landing page and required multiple touch points between the user and an account representative that spanned multiple days.  

User problem

How might we help guide users through the registration process and provide them with information specific to their business?

Business problem

How might we reduce burden for Account Management and speed up the verification process while increasing new registrations on the program's landing page?

The starting point

This is what the Wayfair Business landing page looked like at the start of this project.  Users could access this page from several places onsite to learn more information about the program, as well as, begin the registration process.

The solution

Step 1: Select industry

Focusing first on the landing page, we changed the registration flow by asking users to select their industry first so that we could route them to a new page that spoke directly to the benefits unique to their business.

Step 2: Register

After selecting an industry, users were brought to a new page that was specific to their chosen industry.  This helped route new registrations to the appropriate Account Management team, which was a challenge before and ultimately slowed down the verification process.

As for the registration form itself, we broke up the information we needed from the user into three steps.  This helped the user gauge what was needed upfront and provided an opportunity for them to pick up where they left off should they abandon the form early.  Separately, we worked with the CRM team to ensure that we were able to get users back to site if needed.

Step 3: Account verification

While we were able to smooth out a few bumps in the verification process, users still needed to wait for a Wayfair Business account representative to approve their application.  Because this could take a few days or longer depending on the industry and credentials needed, we wanted to ensure that users understood where they were in the process.  So, as part of the new registration flow, we created a lite version of the Wayfair Business experience. 

Once users completed the registration form, they were able to shop exclusive promotions and the expanded catalog of products, but did not receive discount pricing until their verification was complete. This gave users an incentive to provide additional credentials if needed or follow up with their assigned account representative should an issue arise along the way.

Results

  1. Time elapsed between account registration and account verification improved

  2. CRM click-through-rates improved as the team was able to better target users with the launch of the new industry-specific landing pages

  3. The abandonment rate for the landing page registration form went down