Skroutz gifting experience: 2x increase in customer engagement
Gift-giving in Greece carries a unique cultural nuance: it’s customary to conceal prices for politeness, and ensuring a smooth return process for recipients is essential. However, surveys revealed a key challenge—30% of users hesitated to buy gifts from Skroutz due to uncertainty around returns. The existing return process required the order owner to manage returns, adding friction and inconvenience for both the sender and recipient.
Company
Skroutz.gr
Founded
2005
Industry
E-commerce
Revenue
€132 million (2024)
Company size
400+
What is Skroutz?
Skroutz.gr is Greece’s leading price comparison and online shopping platform, as well as the country’s 4th most visited site. It helps users discover, compare, and purchase products from thousands of online stores while offering detailed reviews, ratings, and secure purchasing options.
Overview
Challenge
How might we simplify the gifting experience by allowing gift recipients to handle returns independently, while ensuring merchants can easily accommodate gift orders without revealing pricing information?
Objectives
Enhance the gifting experience: Develop a solution that simplifies returns for recipients, removing dependency on the sender for returns management.
Facilitate merchant compliance: Ensure that merchants can process gift orders seamlessly, without including invoices or price tags.
Research & Discovery
User survey
The goal of the survey was to investigate the purchasing habits of Skroutz visitors regarding how they buy gifts. During our user research, we discovered a key insight:
1 in 4 users who purchase gifts online were unaware that Skroutz offers the option to send gifts.
This presented a significant opportunity to enhance awareness and promote the gifting feature. By addressing this gap, we could not only improve the user experience but also drive increased engagement with the platform’s gift services.
30% of users hesitated to buy gifts from Skroutz due to three key reasons, as outlined below.
To gain further insights into the concerns of users who rarely or never buy gifts online, we asked participants to identify their primary pain points regarding online gift purchasing. The three most common issues identified were:
These insights highlight the key factors influencing gift-buying decisions among those hesitant to shop online, shedding light on areas for potential improvement in the online gifting experience.
Merchants interviews
Following the research we conducted with our users about their gift-buying habits, we interviewed 6 merchants across all tiers to understand how they manage gift orders in the past.
Merchants want to know the recipient of the gift order, as it helps them decide whether to wrap the product as a gift from the beginning or include the wrapping separately in the order.
In cases where the order has more than one item, they would like to know which of the products the customer wants as a gift.
Constraint & Trade-off
Our goal was to allow users to mark individual products as gifts, we encountered technical limitations that required us to adjust our approach. Ideally, we wanted to give users the flexibility to select which specific items in their order were gifts. However, due to the complexity of the existing system architecture and time constraints, we were unable to implement that level of granularity without significant delays or resource reallocation.
As a trade-off, we made the decision to apply the gift option to the entire order rather than individual products. This solution allowed us to meet the core user need of marking items as gifts while staying within the project’s technical and time limitations.
Design solution
Cart page
Success page
Revamped the success page for gift orders by updating visuals and copy to better resonate with users placing a gift order, creating a more relevant experience.
Gift return card life
Order page
Another update was the addition of a banner on the order page notifying users that the gift return card is ready, with options to either send it to the recipient digitally or print it out.
Share
If a user chooses to share it digitally, they can do so either via email or by copying the link.
If a user prefers a more traditional approach, they can download and print it.
