Best Buy needed to reduce oversell during high-traffic shopping periods (e.g., Thanksgiving weekend) and message their online customers when product availability changed between browsing products, adding to cart, and confirming their order.

The back-end solution increased the frequency of inventory checks. I designed the messaging experience to inform online shoppers when changes were made to their cart (backordered or product removed from their cart). To demonstrate the possible scenarios to product managers, I built a guided Axure prototype.

Although having items become unavailable during checkout isn’t a positive shopping experience, analytics revealed that because of this project, at least 65,000 people were slightly less unhappy when they learned sooner rather than later that they needed to rethink their gift options.

The wireframe below details the changes made to the Review & Submit step to inform the customer of their cart status and options.

Visit the guided Axure prototype to review all scenarios, messaging, and user options.