Vices Gifting

Revolutionary e-commerce gifting experience

Vices Gifting is a bespoke gifting platform which allows shoppers to send gifts to multiple shipping addresses in a single shopping and checkout flow.

I worked closely with sales, operations, IT, and design teams to craft a user experience that would delight shoppers, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in revenue in a short time.

Development Began June 2021
Launched August 2021

Home Page Product List Checkout Page Recipient Form Checkout Page Product Selector

A New Way to Checkout

How do you get visitors to complete a checkout when each product ships to a different address? The premise of Vices Gifting is to allow shoppers to gift luxury gift boxes to all their recipients in one checkout, no matter where the recipients live. My role involved working closely with sales, operations, IT, and design teams to create a user-friendly platform that not only streamlined the gifting process but also maintained Vices' premium, upmarket experience. The platform is designed with accessibility in mind, performs seamlessly across mobile, tablet, and desktop, and supports search engine marketing efforts.

Challenges

Make It New

Until Vices Gifting, no one had cracked an interface for shipping multiple items to the same address. Normally when designing an interface, you lean on the work of others who have been there before. In our case, the only examples we had were what not to do. The challenge was to develop a solution that made it easy for users to pick gifts from the catalog, assign them to recipients with different addresses, and make a single payment without the clunky, multi-step processes of existing solutions. Off-the-shelf systems didn’t fit Vices’ high-end brand and often led to frustration and lost sales due to complex user flows.

Make It Familiar

Through customer feedback, the team at Vices knew that a cohort of customers wanted to send single boxes to multiple recipients, especially during key gifting moments like the holidays. Their existing sales infrastructure was set up mostly to sell subscriptions, though they had tried leveraging their Shopify presence to do “multi-ship.” We knew we were in uncharted territory, but the site still needed to feel and operate like an e-commerce site. Because the site sells a very specific kind of product, we had to continually tailor the traditional ecom paradigm to it.

Serve Any Screen

Not only did we have to invent a brand new shopping paradigm to solve a fairly complex problem, it needed to function flawlessly on every screen from a vertically-oriented phone to a widescreen desktop monitor. As with all web apps, the site needed to be accessible for screen reader users, as well as visitors who use assistive devices.

Process

Collaboration and Ideation

I collaborated with sales, operations, IT, design, and ownership to ensure the platform aligned with the company’s vision and brand aesthetic, while providing a unique user experience. I guided the team through brainstorming and prototyping, beginning with conceptualizing the user journey and testing out ideas through feedback loops with internal teams.

Rapid Prototyping

Vices is the kind of team accustomed to trusting their own in-house expertise to deliver solutions for their users. So, once we sketched out an interface we liked on paper, I began to build. To make the gifting experience feel effortless, we designed a checkout system that allowed users to select gifts and add recipient addresses all within the same page, with no need to navigate multiple steps. I employed techniques like progressive disclosure, which shows users only what they need to see at each step, reducing cognitive load and making the journey feel seamless.

Learn On The Job

Vices knew there was a pent-up demand for their product, and needed it ready in time for the busy holiday gifting season. I developed the functioning site in time for the team to execute a big communications push. We carefully monitored customer feedback as well as logs and analytics to find bugs, edge cases, or unforeseen user demands, and rapidly built and deployed solutions. The result was a complete return on investment and profit within the first quarter of launching.

Solutions

Bespoke Checkout Process

Stunning Product Pages

Reflections

Specialized Products, Specialized Solutions

One reason the shop works well is because the nature of the products is very specific: Vices Gifting only sells curated themed gift boxes, so we didn’t have to consider product options like size and color. If they were to add more traditional e-commerce products, that would greatly increase the complexity of the system.

Balancing Old and New

Old checkout systems had never cracked a simple way to ship multiple gifts to people because they were forced to adhere to the typical checkout process: navigate to each page to view items, pick from options, add to cart, repeat, then go to your cart to enter your shipping address and finally your credit card info. Once we realized that the user needed to match gifts with recipients at the same time, rather than match them later as everyone else had done, building the experience became an enjoyable exploration.

An Atypical Shopping Experience

Building a single-page shopping application was somewhat unheard of. Occasionally, some users are disoriented by the radical departure from the typical shopping flow, which is why we kept the “old school” shopping flow of browse-then-add, even though the UX doesn’t prioritize it.

“Can I Shop For Just Myself?”

The premise of the site was to build a platform where users can buy gifts for multiple people with one checkout. Still, Vices Gifting does get organic traffic from people who are just shopping for themselves. Future versions could better serve that cohort of users, though I would never want to abandon the core use case or stop prioritizing the existing customer base, some of whom gift through the site annually.

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Contact

Gus Watkins

UX, Digital Products, Digital Transformation
for SaaS, Dashboards & E-Commerce

Email
gus@guswatkins.com
Phone
(+1) 323 529 5110
Online
LinkedIn

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