EasyPost fulfillment logged-in dashboard analytics MVP

Role: Design, Prototypes, PM

Team: 1 Designer, 3 Engineer, 2 Data Scientist, 1 Project Manager

Timeline: 3 weeks

Ideation

Vision

We want to visually represent data on our client-facing dashboard to help merchants understand their business. This would include reporting visualizations for financial reporting, shipment reporting, and tracking reporting.

This will mostly be geared toward and beneficial to the small and medium companies that don’t have business and data analysts, or access to BI tools such as Looker or Tableau. Personas within these software clients include business owners, financial officers, logistics managers, transportation directors, and operations managers.

From our customer discovery interviews, larger companies already have some sort of data pipeline and ingestion tool to give them the data they need. However, many have mentioned they would still look at EasyPost’s data just to make sure everything lines up.

Values

The dashboard should show simple, interactive visual reports that empower merchants to champion their brand and maximize their label creation in addition to the CSV reports that we currently offer.

Methods

To start with, the product team is interested in showing data as granularly as refreshed every hour. (Long-term we should aim to show up-to-the-minute (live) data.) In addition, the data set should be able to show data trends for day over day, week over week, month over month, and year over year.

The time scale for the initial phases is dependent upon developer estimates on how long/difficult it would be to provide the data for the different time scales. So, this requirement is flexible.

Phase 1

  • Number of shipments over time
  • Broken out by carrier
  • Cost of shipments over time
  • Broken out by carrier

Use cases

As a business owner I want to see and compare how many shipments I ship each day/week/month across different carriers so that I can understand my business metrics and see how we are doing as a company.

As a business owner / financial executive I want to see my spending with EasyPost across different carriers so I can understand my cash flow and expenses.

Phase 2

  • Heat map showing where shipments are going
  • Transit Times
  • By carrier
  • By service
  • By geography country or states if U.S.

Use cases

As a business owner / logistics director I want to understand where my shipments are going so that I can make educated business decisions (i.e. where to open another warehouse, choose a different carrier, etc.).

As a business owner / VP of customer success I want to see how long it takes for customers to get their shipment so that I can create messaging accordingly.

As a business owner / logistics director I want to understand the transit times for each carrier and service so that I can make carrier and service level choices accordingly to provide a better customer experience.

Phase 3

  • Refunded shipments
  • Add to Number of shipments over time
  • Add to Cost of shipments over time
  • Shipment Statuses
  • EasyPost Spending Report
  • Labels
  • Address Verifications
  • Insurance
  • Shipment Invoices
  • Any other manual charges/credits

Use cases

As a financial executive I want to see the value of my refunded shipments so that I understand my cash flow.

As a business owner / VP of customer success I want to see how many shipments are successfully delivered vs. not so that I set expectations with support staff accordingly.

As a financial executive I want to understand what I’m paying EasyPost for so that I can monitor my expenses and cash flow.

Phase 4 and beyond

  • Cost of shipments over time
  • Breakdown (shipping cost vs. insurance vs. $0.01 fee)
  • By Child Accounts
  • By Geography
  • Transit Times
  • On time delivery

Use cases

As a financial executive I want to see the breakdown of fees that EasyPost is charging me so that I understand my cash flow.

As a business owner / transportation director I want to see how well the carriers are performing so that I can discuss with the carriers and make educated decisions about carrier logic.

Obstacles

User Perspective

Users are unable to easily glance at visual reports to understand what and how their business is doing. For example, they want to know how much money they are spending on shipping, or how often a carrier is used. For small & medium sized businesses, the personas affected are business owners, logistics/operations/transportation managers, and financial executives.

EasyPost currently provides a CSV report generation but that is not easy to use and requires the merchants to have to do extra work on their side to interpret the data.

Sales Perspective

Customers do not choose EasyPost because many other shipping softwares DO offer visual dashboard reporting.

Engineers

Difficult to get a clear picture of people and time resources. A new data warehouse neds to be created so the API warehouse doesnt get pinged so much when large chunks of information are queried.

Measures

  • Increase in dashboard logins/views daily by 15%
  • Increase in time spent on logged in dashboard by 50%
  • (DAU/MAU*30) Number of days in a month that an average user logs in
  • Increase customer (dashboard?) NPS by 15 points
  • Decrease loss of sales & churn due to dashboard reporting by 50%

MVP

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