Fixing the Minimum Spend

How we improved the usability of ordering food and increased conversion by 0.25% (270,000 extra orders per year) for the UK Web platform.

Image 1: Existing system highlighting the problem with the minimum spend.

Just Eat (FTSE 100)  is a leading global marketplace for online food delivery, serving millions of customers across 13 countries. 

Goal

The business goal was to increase the number of UK takeaway orders on the responsive website. One of the experiments that we did for this was choosing to fix the problem with minimum spend.

My role

I was the UX designer and researcher, working in a small tactical team (product manager and 4 software engineers). In a previous usability testing study, I observed problems that some customers were having when trying to order food. Some would struggle to understand and meet the minimum spend of a restaurant. My role involved creating hypotheses, designing solutions and validating them with further testing. I worked with the product manager to plan the a/b test on the live website, and worked closely with the software engineers to understand all of the different states and mechanisms of the basket and checkout. I communicated the different design concepts through Sketch, Zeplin and Axure prototyping.

What is the minimum spend?

Each restaurant has the ability to set a minimum spend. This is a cost that the customer must reach in order to get food delivered. This minimum spend only takes into account the cost of menu items (e.g. food and drink). It does not take into account any additional costs (e.g. delivery fee and tips etc).

What's the problem?

Image 1 shows a basket where the food items (subtotal) are £14.70, but because the system includes the delivery fee of £2, the total shows £16.70. The customer knows they need to spend £15 to meet the minimum but the total is showing £16.70, and since the checkout button is disabled until the minimum has been reached, the customer becomes confused and stuck. Through usability testing, we found several customers giving up when trying to place an order because of this problem.

Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1

We believe that additional fees (e.g. delivery fee) shouldn’t be applied to the user’s cost if there is first a prerequisite to fulfil (e.g. a minimum spend), so if we charge the user the delivery fee after they have met the minimum spend, then we will see less people getting stuck and an increase in conversion.

Hypothesis 2

We believe that users struggle to understand if they’ve qualified for delivery, so if we update them on how much more they need to spend, then we will see an increase in conversion.

Design Variants

Control

• UK Web AS-IS

Variant 1

• Delivery fee is only added when the user has reached the minimum spend.
• When an item has been added, the yellow banner copy tells the user how much left they need to spend for delivery.
  
• Yellow banner moved to below the checkout button.

Variant 1

Variant 2

• Delivery fee is only added when the user has reached the minimum spend.
• When an item has been added, the yellow banner copy tells the user how much left they need to spend for delivery.
  
• Checkout button moved to the bottom of your order.
  

Variant 2

Outcomes

• Variant 1 saw a 0.21% increase in conversion for UK Web.
• Variant 2 saw a 0.25% increase in conversion for UK Web, which is roughly 270,000 orders on a year to year basis.
• After the A/B Test completed, Variant 2 was rolled out on UK Web as a permanent feature. This brought in 120,703 incremental orders for the remainder of 2017 (from Sep-Dec). We also rolled this change out on Android and iOS, and in all international countries.
• A qualitative research study found that people understood quicker how much they needed to spend and pre-empted that that they wouldn't be able to checkout, if they hadn't yet met the minimum spend.

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© 2019 Mark Davies