Walmart Registry Incentives
In 2024, the Walmart Registry team aims to relaunch the Welcome Box experience for customers who create registries on Walmart. As the lead designer on registries, my responsibility was to design a MVP Welcome Box experience and set the team up for success in the registry incentive platform strategy.
Registry Welcome Box
Until 2022, Walmart registries offered a free Welcome Box consisting of newborn essentials for customers who create a baby registry on Walmart.com. Since the registry north star initiative, the registries business team wanted to relaunch this program with new parameters that would incentivize customers for not only choosing Walmart registries but also growing their registry size.
With the new parameters, the registrant needs a way to keep track of their progress. This would help with the discovery of registry incentives and also keep the registrant motivated to continue towards their goal.
In the future, the registry team plans to expand their spectrum of registry perks, therefor, creating an ‘incentive platform’ that encourages registrants to reach higher registry milestones as they redeem their rewards.
Setting new parameters
The first phase of the project was offering baby registrants the Registry Welcome Box. While customers were able to claim this reward just by creating a registry before, the 4-in-the-box brainstormed was to set up some parameter in this relaunch so that we are getting ‘quality’ registrants who stay for extended engagement.
I also did some competitive research across our competitors to see how they measure registry ‘tasks’ for customers to be eligible for registry rewards.
Some of the parameters that would help us ensure registry growth were:
Registry is kept open for ~ days
Registrant has has more than ~ items to their registry
~or more unique gifters have purchased items from the registry
Data visualization
I explored various ways we could help the customers visualize their progress. Since the parameters keep track of different metrics like # of days, items, and people, I needed the data visualization to be universal and flexible.
Changing incentives
Reward redemption
Discovery surfaces
Incentive platform
Research
While the MVP Welcome Box was being designed, the business team worked with the marketing team to run research on what type of incentives would motivate customers to choose Walmart registries.
This further reinforced our prioritization of Welcome Box as phase 1 launch and inspired us to start thinking about expanding our registry incentives.
Workshopping
Two systematic approaches
‘Point system’
One of the approaches I looked at first was a ‘point system’ similar to apps like Starbucks. In this system, registrants would accumulate points according to registry tasks they complete and redeem prizes using those prizes.
This approach would introduce a new concept of ‘points’ specific to registry to customers, which may create confusion. Additionally, it would require a robust ecosystem of how we allocate points to different registry tasks and rewards. Considering a customer’s registry lifecycle averages around 3-4 months, it would not be worth the effort from both the registry team and the customers to build & make sense of this system.
‘Build up system’
Another approach is the ‘build up’ system, similar to apps like Target Circle. In this system, registrants would complete tasks with increasing goal metrics to redeem different rewards.
This approach seemed to make sense, as it doesn’t use a middle-man concept of ‘points’, which might require customers to do mental gymnastics. It would also require lesser amount/variations of rewards, as it communicates ‘redeem all rewards’ rather than ‘choose from these rewards’.
Templatizing components
The incentive platform was one of the priorities for the team in FY 26. I wanted to set the team up for success before I roll off the team. This meant creating a reusable design for the expanded types of incentives product & business will finalize on.
Some things I kept in mind as I explored these designs were:
Can the design accommodate keeping track of single vs many tasks per reward?
Does the design accommodate quantifiable metrics (i.e. how many gifters out of 5 gifters?) vs more proportional metrics (i.e. how much $ out of $500) ?
Is the design flexible enough to show different types of rewards?
Most importantly, I wanted the designs to be light-weight enough so customers are kept within the registry experience but comprehensive enough to describe all the associated details and terms.