Over 80% of the suppliers that integrate with Wayfair are "Manual" suppliers. Manual suppliers use Wayfair's web portal to manage orders, inventory, and shipping.
When joining Wayfair, suppliers would be profiled as Manual or Integrated depending on the answers they provided to a logic driven questionnaire. Suppliers would fill out the questionnaire and a profile type would be sent to a Wayfair Administrator. The Administrator and supplier would then engage through tickets and email to complete set-up and integration.
We originally focused on making API and EDI integrations easier. Research changed our direction. We could enable manual suppliers much more quickly, they were the bulk of the users coming through the flow, and we could automate backend settings based on a focused flow.
A Fork in the Flow
We added a screen to the flow that would allow our suppliers to self-select their set-up. Suppliers that self-selected Basic would be set up as manual suppliers. Those that self-selected Advanced would go through the previous Questionnaire experience.
This approach allowed us to focus on, and optimizing the Manual suppliers while keeping the the API and EDI suppliers supported.
Self-Selecting and Setup
Automating the Setup
By eliminating the Profiling Questionnaire and allowing suppliers to self select, we focused the questions on items that would add the correct data and settings to the system. This eliminated Wayfair Administrators having to manually enter data and configure backend systems.
Successful Setups Increased 3x
After launch successful setups increased over 3 times the number of the prior experience. The amount of time a supplier took to complete the step and become active dropped 78% from 40 hours to 9.
The success of the design also removed the need for Wayfair Administrators to perform any actions for manual suppliers and allowed them to focus on API and EDI integrations, increasing velocity on those integrations as well.
