Scaling Commerce for a
3,000-Store Co-op
Snapshot
Client / Do it Best is a U.S.-based, member-owned cooperative supplying hardware and building materials to 2,000+ members across 3,000 retail locations in 50+ countries, with $5B in wholesale revenue and an estimated $14B in member retail sales.
Company / Publicis Sapient
Focus / B2C & B2B platform E-commerce Transformation
Role / Experience Lead, Design, Research
Team / 20 people across design, product, and engineering
Timeline / 10 months to launch
Do it Best was looking to build a centralized, single-vendor platform with best-in-class tools for customer experience, marketing, and data.
The Challenge
Do it Best needed to modernize its e-commerce platform to keep pace with rapid “buy online, pick up in store” and digital growth, while unifying the experience across doitbest.com and thousands of independently owned member stores.
The existing experience limited customers to local inventory, leading to lost sales; lacked consistency across corporate and member-owned stores; and never quite worked for both audiences it needed to serve at once: B2C shoppers browsing to buy in-store, and B2B retailers depending on the same platform to power their own sales.
The Reality
Unlike traditional retail, the platform had to support a cooperative model where independent stores operate as both customers and operators, a structure that shaped every decision that followed:
Dual audience complexity.
B2C customers and B2B member retailers needed fundamentally different things from the same platform.A distributed retail network.
Thousands of independently owned stores meant balancing central consistency with real local flexibility.Operational constraints at the store level.
Member stores lacked efficient tools for same-day pickup and fulfillment, and that friction showed up directly in the customer experience.Global team collaboration.
Coordinating across North America and India took real, deliberate alignment to keep the experience consistent.
Strategy &
Key Decisions
The platform had to serve two audiences at once, not choose between them: B2C customers wanting online-to-in-store convenience, and B2B retailers relying on the system to power their own sales. Here's what was prioritized:
One platform, built to scale.
A single-vendor system connecting 3,000+ stores, supporting both corporate and local store experiences.Fulfillment that flexes.
Same-day pickup, ship-to-store, delivery, and transfer, so customers could get what they needed however worked for them.Discovery that actually works.
Helped users find products and verify real inventory fast, without store-hopping.Tools built for the people using them.
Designed Pick & Pack to streamline store-level fulfillment and make reliability possible, not aspirational.
Member stores are mostly mom-and-pop shops serving rural areas, where shoppers built real relationships in person. But if an item wasn't in stock locally, they waited or drove to another store.
Visibility, selection, and convenience were the real friction points.
My Role
As Experience Lead, I stayed hands-on with research, wireframing, and delivery throughout, while working closely with a North American team of two designers. My work included:
Bridged two continents.
Led end-to-end UX/UI design across research, wireframing, and delivery.Built the system.
Built and scaled a reusable design system across global teams.Aligned design and engineering.
Ran development refinement sessions to keep cross-functional work moving in step.Owned the client relationship.
Served as primary client contact, presenting solutions and managing stakeholder feedback directly.
The Impact
During the soft launch, Hotjar tracking revealed high drop-off on "Add to Cart" and Checkout. We re-engineered the checkout flow in response, and within the first two months of relaunch:
+67% online revenue post-launch
+60% increase in orders, including +56% in ship-to-store specifically
+4.6% increase in average order value, driven by same-day pickup
What I'm proudest of: we didn't just launch and hope. We watched real behavior, found the actual friction point, and fixed it before it became a bigger problem.
My Learnings
Global collaboration requires intentional alignment.
Working across distributed teams required stronger coordination to maintain consistency and speed.Small behaviors build stronger teams.
Keeping cameras on during remote collaboration improved communication and team cohesion.Advocate for testing early and often.
Grounding decisions in real user behavior reduced risk and led to more effective design outcomes.
Discovery Highlights
Facilitated a 2-day in-person discovery workshop with cross-functional client stakeholders to align on goals, surface priorities, and define project success criteria.
Shoppers access Do it Best through the main site or member sites. Two personas and journeys were mapped to capture these distinct paths.
Evaluated the site through heuristic principles to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Performed a competitive analysis to identify strengths, gaps, and differentiators guiding strategy.
Built and scaled an accessible, reusable design system across U.S. and India teams, reducing inconsistencies and accelerating feature delivery.
Toolkit extension with component variations and pattern guides.
The Design System handoff included detailed component usage guidelines and requirements for designers, developers, and content authors. This was particularly valuable given the large CMS component, enabling authors (DIB & Members) to customize content effectively.
Key Wireframes
Produced mid-fidelity wireframes to test and refine the design system.
As a co-op, the challenge was to create a unified customer experience across DoitBest.com and member sites while supporting individual branding. To address this, we needed a header design that enabled customizable navigation and content.
Flexible header solution that accommodates both DoitBest.com and member sites.
Navigation
PLP
Mobile
PDP
Dealer Search and Results
As E-commerce orders grew, member stores lacked a fast, reliable way to fulfill same-day pickup and ship-to-store orders, resulting in operational delays and friction. The Pick & Pack App streamlined store fulfillment, enabling faster, more reliable same-day pickup and ship-to-store orders.