Payments & Deductions
Managing the inflow and outflow of money
Project Overview
My Role
I worked as the lead UX designer overseeing all projects, making sure the experiences were consistent. I built learning materials based on discovery work and gave presentations evangelizing our work and it’s importance to Walmart. I was point person for connecting with other product teams outside of Supplier and brought up opportunities to cross collaborate.
The Problem
Today, Suppliers don’t have any visibility into their charges and why they are being charged. They specifically referenced this as one of their biggest pain points during generative user interviews.
The Opportunity
How might we allow Suppliers to view at a big picture level and at a detail level the inflow and outflow of money with Walmart?
How might we reduce the time suppliers spend on unnecessary detective work, filing redundant tickets, and jumping between multiple tools?
The Process
Discovery
Terminology
Deduction reasons
Allowances
User journey map
Backstage actions
Flow from platform perspective
AP and AR code example flows
Competitive analysis
Design solutioning
User test and interviews
Methodology
User quotes
The findings
Future wireframe
Prototyping the idea
Discovery
First, I needed to learn the process of how suppliers received payments and handled deductions.
I started by defining the terminology to make sure we were communicating effectively.
I researched why suppliers received deductions
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Missing items
Sometimes not everything requested was received.
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Wrong item
Sometimes the wrong thing was sent.
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Low quality items
Sometimes items are damaged or expired
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Wrong arrival time
Sometimes items arrive too early or too late to a warehouse or customer
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Payment discrepancies
Sometimes Walmart pays the supplier too much or too little
Learning about allowances
Mistakes happen, that’s why we have allowances. Allowances are set amounts that are determined during onboarding in the negotiation phase and are assigned at the 9-digit Supplier ID number.
These determine how much money can be applied to their deductions for free. Anything above the allowance shows up on their dashboards as payable fines.
The user journey and information architecture
The payments and deductions process goes back and forth between the supplier and the Walmart associate. I mapped out the business process to get a better idea of the backstage actions. I also created a visual interpretation of the information architecture representing how a purchase order is divided, how they payments are applied and at what levels are the actions applied, such as deductions and disputes.
On a more detail level, there were two ways a supplier received deductions
Deductions are identified by codes, mainly Accounts Payable Codes (AP) and Accounts Receivable Codes (AR)
Accounts Payable Deduction (AP Code)
Taken off an invoice, suppliers are not paid in full
The supplier invoices Walmart for the amount of $5,000. But because the Distribution Center only received goods for the amount of $4,500, Walmart takes $500 off the check sent to the supplier.
Accounts Receivable Deduction (AR Code)
Supplier gets a new invoice
The supplier ran advertisements with Walmart Connect. Walmart invoices the supplier for the amount of $1,000 expecting payment from the supplier.
Mapping the steps from a platform perspective
On any given day, a supplier might have to jump between at least 6 different platforms to find out:
how much are they being charged
what items are associated to the charge
why are they being charged
and how to file a dispute on that charge
Competitive analysis
Interestingly, Walmart is the only one of the big three retailers who makes a distinction between AP and AR codes.
Target is in a similar state as we are, with their payment related platforms all separated.
Amazon’s experience was the most unified.
Let’s dive deeper into Amazon’s unified experience.
They included features we were missing, such as trends, projections, and breakdowns based on deduction types.
Leveraging a merchant-facing tools for Suppliers
After seeing what amazon provided for their users, we identified a platform we already had that provided similar capabilities and could fill in some of the gaps we were finding.
The platform was a Walmart facing tool that was managed by an outside organization hired to consolidate all our AP and AR deductions and provide trend data to help identify problem areas.
There was a lot of work to do to reskin the tool to Supplier One patterns and visual styling, but the data it would provide would be a game changer for our suppliers.
The designs
After some back and forth determining the scope of the project, we decided to focus on just the deductions details table and the trends charts for the first release as it provided the most value for suppliers.
Project challenges:
Since we were working on an outside platform we were relying on an outside development team that does not have access to our design library. They would have to recreate our patterns from scratch and match them visually which led to extensive VQA work.
Sometimes it required creative one-off solutions to make the design work, such as nesting the page in a full page takeover since the navigation would need to be updated and mirrored every time another development team had to make a change.
Since the tool was intended for a Walmart facing audience, there needed to be extensive content reviews to make sure that the terminology made sense, and we needed to include contextual guides to help get new suppliers up to speed.
User test & interviews
With an MVP design in hand, we interviewed suppliers about their current process and then showed them the design for feedback.
User feedback
“I wasn’t comfortable [navigating Walmart’s portals] for at least the first three months.”
There’s a high learning curve to becoming a supplier, especially with hundreds of applications in our library, and how the payment platforms are spread across several apps.
“You guys are shortpaying – our job is to figure out why. Sometimes you guys make that easy, sometimes not so much.”
How can we reduce that detective work?
“We are evaluating them [SupplyPike] as a potential third party system. They are expensive so we are looking at all options. We would use them primarily for shortage disputes...to capture the amount of sales we have incoming, we are looking for additional support."
Our current experience is so convoluted that some suppliers are hiring outside agencies to handle their deductions for them.
The findings
While attending the supplier interviews, I took notes and messaged our researcher when I wanted to learn more about something a supplier said.
We confirmed that the current system was confusing and sometimes had gaps.
All of suppliers wished for a streamlined payments experience to view their deductions.
Some suppliers had to hire outside agencies to handle their deductions for them.
Some suppliers would file a ticket instead of filing a dispute because it was too confusing.
For the design itself we learned:
Most suppliers wanted to incorporate the check number into the deductions table.
Some suppliers did not understand certain columns included in the deductions table.
Some suppliers were not sure if the columns represented Walmart's order/invoice numbers or their own.
Based on this feedback I iterated on the design with the ability to search by check number, and incorporating more contextual help in the table columns and started a content scrub of the current experience, as well as requesting a library of all the different sub codes and what they meant.
Future wireframe
With the feedback we received from the user test, I started to make a wireframe to address their comments.
I wanted to think further than the MVP and how we might be able to link to more pages and have it pre-filtered by that PO. This helped me start a conversation with my product managers and include some of these features into the MVP.
Restructuring the data by check number and allowing the user one place to dispute their deductions would require incorporating more platforms but definitely drove the conversation and is being used as a guide towards the next iterations of these pages.
Prototyping the idea
From that sketch I began to make high fidelity mock ups for the check pages and later the invoice and dispute pages to round out the end to end experience. Our next steps are to contact the suppliers from our first generative research study to see if these designs met their needs.