Impulse Items in Cart
Company: The Kroger Co. | Date: 2020
How can you show additional items to customer before they check out to increase monetization without degrading the customer experience at the most important moment in their eCommerce experience?
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
Technology Used: Sketch, Invision
Background
One of Kroger’s internal teams developed a list of items to show the customer to increase monitization efforts. This initiative was part of the larger Kroger warehouse project. The Items that would be shown to customers as “Impulse” items, would be super-clearance items from a specific warehouse (typically items that were due to expire within the next week.) This means that only customers that were having their groceries delivered from a Kroger Warehouse could access this list of impulse items.
This was one of those initiatives where Leadership had asked for this experience which put us on a condensed timeline. We were told that it was going into cart, so I had to figure out how best to implement this experience that would provide the user with the information but not negatively impact their experience.
Challenge
The biggest challenge of this project was to find a good place for this carousel of items on Android and iOS.
There’s limited space within the cart, so every choice to add something comes with costs.
I had to get creative.
(<Native Cart in the Kroger app as it appeared in 2020)
Final Designs
*delivered to product, not implemented
The (less than ideal) solve I came up with is to change the “Forgetting something” bar that already existed at the bottom of cart from an accordian to a modal experience.
Shifting this to a modal experience allowed me to put tabs/toggle at the top for customers to be able to look at different categories of impulse items.
Additionally, I added the “Check out…” button to the bottom of the modal, so that a customer could check the Forgetting something modal, and then immediately move to checkout, rather than having to go back to the previous screen and then go to checkout.
This experience worked well for additional recommendation items, but didn’t work for the specific Impulse experience described in the Background section above. Only when we delivered the designs was it clarified that it was specific to Kroger Delivery.
The final design (as it appears today, 2026) was the same experience, just in Checkout, after you select your delivery time and method.