Party City

Faster Shopping with Live Inventory

Summary

Mission

Party City is the largest retailer of party goods in the U.S., with 700+ stores across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and an online inventory of over 50,000 products. Their goal was to increase conversion by clearly displaying inventory data, preventing user errors, and removing checkout blockers caused by inventory issues.

My Contributions

As the principal UX Designer, I worked with the Engingeering and Store Operations team to create a global banner that used auto-geolocation to display a user's nearest pickup store, redesigned product pages to display live inventory data from that store, and created a go-forward path for out-of-stock items by allowing users to (1) change their pickup store to another nearby store or (2) switch from pickup to shipping.

Impact

After the redesign, cart abandonment decreased by 6%, while conversion increased by 1% during a 90-day monitoring period and 32% after the busy season. Customer satisfaction also increased by 10%.

Client

Party City | Pleasanton, CA

Services

User Interface Design
User Experience Design
User Experience Strategy
User Research
Persona Creation
Wireframing
Webflow Development

THE PROCESS - STEP 1

Discovery

Platform

Party City has a responsive website, with 74% of our users browsing our site through a mobile device and then completing their purchase on desktop. Therefore, while we have designed for both desktop and mobile, we approach designs from a mobile-first perspective.

Our Users

Our primary target audience consisted of mothers who wanted to create celebratory moments with their families. They prioritized speed, value, and finding specific products they knew their children would love, with 70% of users opting for in-store pickup. We designed our new experience with these users in mind.

The Problem

“It said ‘In-Store Pickup,’ but I still can't get it?!”

“Why show me items that aren't available at my store?”

“Why isn't there an option to filter items based on store, like Target?”

After reading the lowest ratings from our customer feedback and reviewing shopping sessions through Auryc, our session replay software, it was clear that users were abandoning their shopping sessions due to pervasive inventory problems.

The main issues:

Although most users preferred in-store pickup, the default setting of our Add to Cart button added items with 3-5 day shipping, causing confusion at Cart.
We didn’t have an “in-stock” filter among our product filters.
Store inventory information was buried underneath a link on each product, making it difficult to purchase multiples of the same product (see 1st and 2nd screen in the image below).
Users found it difficult to change their pickup store because the instructions were unclear (see 3rd screen in the image below).

Old In-Store Pickup Experience (Highlights Added)

THE PROCESS - STEP 2

The Solution

Goal: display inventory positions clearly and offer workarounds for inventory shortages

We wanted to create visual cues that would:

Prominently display the name of a user’s nearest store (based on distance).
Show the live inventory of available units at that store.
Allow users to filter out products that are sold out at their nearest store.
Give users another way to get a desired item if their nearest store runs out of inventory.
Allow users to shop faster by scanning product listing pages more quickly.

Global store banner minimized inventory confusion by automatically setting a user's default store based on geolocation.

We started by creating a banner that automatically set a user’s nearest pickup store using geolocation data from their IP address. From then on, all inventory data would be dynamically pulled from that specific store, so users would be clear on which items were in stock or sold out. If the user’s desired items were sold out at their nearest store, we allowed them to switch to another store or change their shopping preference to standard shipping (which displayed inventory data from our main warehouse).

Redesigning the PLP with a 2-column grid, inventory status labels, and an in-stock checkbox allowed users to shop faster

For the product listing page, we wanted users to be able to browse more quickly and focus only on the items in their store. To improve scannability, we redesigned the product listing page to be a 2-column grid, added colored inventory status labels, and included a “show in-stock items only” checkbox that allowed users to filter out the clutter of items they couldn’t get.

Redesigning the product detail page with shopping preference swatches and stock quantity eliminated an extra step

We redesigned each item’s product detail page with the same shopping preference swatches featured in the universal store banner. This allowed users to quickly view inventory positions and add items to their cart without interacting with a modal.

Redesigning the cart with granular inventory statuses removed another barrier from checkout

During testing, we noticed that users often added items to their cart with a combination of pickup, delivery, or shipping preferences. After reaching their cart, they would then try to find one preference where all their desired items were in stock, often navigating back and forth to the product pages to check inventory.

To help our users determine the best shopping preference for getting as many items as possible, we decided to display all inventory statuses granularly in the cart. This allowed users to see which items were in-stock or out-of-stock at a glance and removed yet another blocker from checkout.

Final Thoughts & Next Steps

After launch, analytics showed that cart abandonment had decreased by 6%. Conversion had also increased by 1% during a 90-day monitoring period (and 32% after our busy season). Reports from our feedback tool also indicated that customer satisfaction had increased by 10%. Our future iterations would focus on creating icons for a faster read. We also hoped to include the inventory positions of swatches (numbers, letters, and sizes) onto the product listing and product detail pages.

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