Discovery: Select substitute items in orders for customer pick-up

To prevent lost sales & better fulfill customer orders, Lowe's began to explore the process of implementing product substitutions

Problem Statement


Some sales can be salvaged by substituting an alternative item when the requested item is not available to fulfill the customer order.

Challenges Discovered

There are 4 primary areas where our team needs to investigate the inclusion of substitutions. This will require cross team collaboration & hand off of information.

  1. Substitutions Enabled
    Hand off of substitution preferences from the customer
  2. Order Picking
    Identify where substitutions exists in associate order picking
  3. Customer Communications
    Describe methods of communicating substitutions to customer
  4. Approvals
    Explore substitution approval process

Once this feature is delivered, we will want to evaluate how to continually improve substitions for the customer based on item preferences placing an emphasis on customer feedback.

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...to be continued...

This project is dependent on enabling resourcing & enhancing cancellations within the order picking process. This feature has been paused while further refinements to the orders application are made.