UX Fulfillment Strategy & Checkout Optimization
Walmart
Optimizing the customer experience for a seamless online-to-store journey.
Objective
Help Walmart identify the ideal point in the shopping journey for customers to choose between delivery or in-store pickup — balancing user expectations with operational efficiency.
Results
Client
Walmart
Industry
Retail
Project Time
3 months (2021)
Methods
- Customer Journey Map
- Personas
- Wireframes
Company Profile
Walmart is one of the world’s largest retailers, offering customers flexible shopping options across online and physical stores. With an increasing shift toward hybrid fulfillment models, Walmart aimed to refine how customers choose delivery and pickup to improve both convenience and efficiency.
The challenge
As Walmart expanded its online ordering process, customers could now choose between delivery and pickup — but the timing of this choice created friction.
Should users choose fulfillment before shopping, so they see accurate availability and pricing?
Or after, to avoid interrupting their flow?
This decision had implications across logistics, technology, and customer satisfaction. The team needed clear guidance on how and where to best integrate the fulfillment decision into the shopping journey.
“Working with Frauke was a game-changer. She asked the right questions, helped us rethink key decisions, and guided us through some pretty intense working sessions. We came out feeling aligned, confident, and ready to move forward.”
Approach
As part of Walmart’s ongoing ecommerce fulfillment strategy, I led a UX research and competitive analysis sprint to identify where in the customer journey shoppers should choose between delivery and pickup.
This insight helped streamline the checkout experience, reducing decision friction and setting the foundation for future omnichannel improvements.
To provide direction, I led a comprehensive UX research and strategy sprint:
Reviewed existing personas and analytics to identify key user motivations — speed, effort, and price.
Mapped the current shopping journey, highlighting friction points related to fulfillment choices.
Conducted a competitive review of 10 global retailers, evaluating how each integrated delivery and pickup options.
Synthesized findings through heuristic evaluations and journey mapping to uncover best practices and hidden dependencies between user experience and backend logistics.
Facilitated a collaborative workshop to align design, marketing, and product teams around key recommendations and their operational impact.
The project established a clear, data-driven direction for Walmart’s fulfillment strategy:
Identified the optimal decision point for fulfillment selection within the customer journey.
Delivered UX recommendations to improve clarity, speed, and trust in the checkout flow.
Created an ideal end-to-end customer flow that considered both user needs and logistical realities.
The findings were later used internally to guide cross-functional discussions between design, logistics, and engineering teams.
