The end of printing

First Printless Returns in Ovoko history

During return research not long after talking with the French team, I noticed that print labels suck. You’re lucky if you even have a printer. Then it has to actually work, have ink... For an average mortal like me, I don’t have a printer at home. So we have to find a service that does it, go there, spend money on the paper... I’m getting irritated just typing this!

So I thought “Why has Ovoko never done printless returns?!”.

Autonomy days

Autonomy Days is just another word for hackathon at Ovoko, we have one every quarter. Since the PM didn’t buy my idea to implement it together with returns, I didn’t give up and used Autonomy Days to try it out.

“Don’t do it, too many unknowns”

During autonomy days, we can take initiative and work alone, but since I knew I’d need both backend and frontend support, I needed reinforcement. So, I shared my idea with the frontend and backend folks from the shipping team. They seemed excited!

Since the digital QR would be shown to users, I shared the idea with the PM but he wasn’t really buying it, since a lot of unknowns could happen.

Then I did my research and found out that the DPD API already passes the QR and PIN code values. That means the info for a digital label was always there, just no one had ever done it before.

After hearing this, he started buying in a little more, and we agreed that I could experiment.

Took PM’s hat for 3 days

I had never been in a Product Manager’s role, so I was just starting to realise what I’d gotten involved in 😄

First thing I knew we needed visibility of our progress, so created a Trello board.

I had to onboard the team on what we’re doing, how we’re going to do it, and what the goal is.

The goal was simple: a beta version for locker returns in Lithuania with DPD, using QR/PIN.

Started with Hotjar survey

Since I had some evidence from interviews with the French team, I needed some quantitative data, the bigger picture: how many of our marketplace buyers actually have printers at home?

As a BMW owner, I bought a Mercedes-Benz CD player

Yup, so at first we just needed to see if the idea worked out of the box. Shipping QA sent me a QR from the backend on an order (I had ordered a CD player a few days before Autonomy Days).

I gave a task to my fiancé so I could film the process of returning an item through a DPD locker using that QR.

We just wanted to try the solution and not have to ask our users for any additional prerequisites.

And it worked! But pretty soon we knew we’d f*cked up 😅

Yeah, so everything went smoothly, we put the parcel in the locker. Then the next day, we got a call from a DPD courier asking where he should send the parcel, because the receiver’s address was listed as that locker. That’s when we realised we’d messed up. We had accidentally swapped the sender and receiver addresses in the backend.

Long story short: we fixed it and moved forward.

Real life example

No more scissors, duct tape, or paper. Just a QR.

Our charming UI

We focused on mobile since the traffic is twice as high. But as agreed, we also kept the printed version in case something unexpected happens.

Results

We got a lot of applause and totally rocked it during the presentation. To measure the real impact, we don’t get an event from the DPD locker indicating whether the digital label was used or not. But we do get an event when a parcel is inserted into the locker, and we can match that to the timeframe when the user opened the QR label modal.

It’s still live in our marketplace for the DPD shipping provider when the return method is "to locker" and in the Baltics.