“Buy it now”
Shift is on a mission to make used car buying and ownership fair and simple. Shift’s unique value prop is that it “delivers test drives to your front door", where customers can test drive and then buy a car right from their driveway.
To help grow the business, I led an effort to introduce a new business line that we called, “Buy it now,” where customers could bypass the test drive, buy a car online, and have it delivered right to their door.
This new way of buying a car eventually turned into the primary way that Shift sold cars.
Introduction
In late 2019, Shift had set aggressive sales targets, but as we continued to sell more cars, we were encountering a new problem: our operational costs (fulfilling test drives out at customers’ houses) were rising and eating into our margins. We had to hit our sales targets while getting this cost under control.
In my time leading the design team, I saw an opportunity for us to leverage our unique understanding of users and drive impact for the company.
Discovery and Brainstorming
The entire design team got together to consider what investments we could make that might sell more cars while improving our operational costs. When reviewing past interviews with our customers, we noticed an insight that had come up more than once: some customers who purchased cars with Shift went through the test drive process because they had to, but they already knew they were going to buy the car.
It made us wonder: could we sell our cars entirely online, sight-unseen? “Buy it now” had been born.
Building cross-functional alignment
In order to add an entirely new product line to sell cars online, we’d need help from across the entire company. As the project lead, I crafted a vision doc and started to socialize it with our partners from across the company. Some highlights:
Sales: Our sales team loved the idea. Unlike our test drives, every “buy it now” appointment was a guaranteed sale. It would help them focus on our highest-intent customers.
Field operations: In their role as our front-line workers, they were the ones who drove out cars to customers’ homes for test drives. They loved the idea of a shorter appointment with no customer objections. If they could serve more customers in a day’s work, their sales numbers might go up.
Reconditioning: The reconditioning team identified some risks. What if they missed something and a car was delivered to a customer with something wrong? With a test drive, the customer experience of finding something wrong with the car wasn’t as bad. But the team was up to the challenge of tightening and executing higher standards.
Business operations: They were able to model out the reduction in operational costs and the potential increased sales from this new sales channel. They were also excited about the prospect of using “buy it now” to rapidly expand our service area, since shipping a car to a distant area was much simpler and cheaper than building out a retail location to serve test drives.
Ideation and execution
As a designer began work to build out the user experience, I challenged him to treat the project as an MVP for us to test the viability of this new service. What would be a cheap, low-risk way to build confidence in this new product line?
He built a concept that offered “buy it now” side-by-side with the traditional test drive option. Once the user clicked into the CTA, there was a short flow that captured the user’s contact information and held the car for them. From there, our sales team would call the customer to finalize the purchase. We knew that the future of this product would be an entirely-online purchase experience, but we didn’t want to over-invest in our learning phase.
Results
To our surprise, “buy it now” jumped to 15% of total sales. And with only a 1.5% return rate, it resulted in a 45% savings in overall fulfillment costs for the company.
The test was so successful that at the end of the experiment, the exec team asked us to leave it up and running while we moved the next phase of work to the top of the roadmap.
In early 2020, the pandemic gripped the world and many retail businesses, including Shift, shut down. Customers were uncomfortable visiting our dealerships or taking a test drive with a Shift employee. “Buy it now” was the perfect solution to this, and it leapt to 100% of our total sales and kept the company afloat during a challenging time.
What I would do differently
I was proud of the team’s ability to work quickly and experimentally, and ship an MVP to prioritize learning. When the test succeeded so definitively, we had to scramble to keep the test online and working. We could have done a better job of planning for all outcomes, including a best case scenario where we turn it on to 100% right away.
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