Overview
Members of the Enterprise UX Selling team researched how competitors integrated donations into their checkout process. We analyzed 5 indirect and direct competitors to identify improvements to the current Lowe’s donation process.
From this, we identified 6 findings to improve our self-checkout donation experience. By incorporating the strengths of competitor experiences and integrating these insights, Lowe’s can create an exemplary self-checkout rewards experience.
Objective
Gain insight into how other stores with self checkout incorporate charity contributions into their process. To improve the number of prompts the checkout system has that impacts the overall transaction time.
Background
Lowes implemented RoundUp for Charity during the pandemic to address a coin shortage. The goal was to allow customers to donate to a charity while reducing the need for cashiers to provide change. This turned out to be wildly successful, bringing in almost $1 million in individual donations per year. As a result, Lowes expanded the program to include credit and debit cards. However, the checkout time for customers increased up to 63 seconds, adding ten seconds to the process.
Research
Competitive Analysis
Of the 12 that were evaluated only 3 (including Lowes) met the requirements of offering self-checkout and a donation prompt. Because of this, I have added those experiences where donation prompts occur during the assisted checkout process.
I evaluated 12 direct and indirect competitors to understand how charity donations were applied by different retailers. We used this analysis to identify common trends and identify opportunities to improve our experience.
Competitor Screens
To capture these screens I clipped a gopro to my chest and went through each checkout process. Most were associate to customer prompting where the associate would scan a barcode to add the donation as a line item to your cart.
Findings
- Most competitors prompt immediately after cart phase
- Average time reading the donation prompt was 5 secs
- There was usually a specific charity mentioned in the prompt
- After the donation prompt, most stores went to the payment screen
** Taco Bell’s charity prompt is built into the tender screen.
Key Takeaways
- The prompt always happened immediately after the customer taps “Pay Now” for self checkout
- Making the prompt more obvious grabs the customer’s attention
- The charity’s logo made it easier to understand who the customer’s donation benefited
- Adding an animation when the customer donates makes it a fun reward to do the task
- Even with a complete analog donation prompt, the customer was still asked before they paid
- Using the in-store audio to help explain the charity could help the customers understand more about how it works before seeing the prompt at checkout
Suggested Changes
From the key takeaways the team decided on the the top four most effective changes.
- Placement of the prompt within checkout process
- Visual changes to alert the customer to new information
- Adding logos to the donation prompt.
- Audio announcements within the store or within the checkout process