The Home Depot
Enabling Online & Appliance Regional Pricing
appliance complex install and online product categories.
Disclaimer: Details of the project are intentionally vague and have been obscured for proprietary purposes of The Home Depot. Due to this, I cannot share the prototype.
Deliverables
Research Readout
High Fidelity Designs
Prototypes
My Role
Lead UX Researcher
Lead UX Designer
Team
2 Product Managers
IT/Engineering Team
Tools
Figma
Miro
Year
2024
OVERVIEW
Building on Insights
Home Depot’s national pricing model worked well at scale, but it couldn’t account for critical differences in store-level service costs, regional competition, and freight expenses.
Through collaboration with product and engineering, I led the research and design strategy to enable store-level pricing capabilities for online and appliance categories. We reconstructed workflows across online, appliance, and store selling channels – creating a scalable, intuitive solution for regional pricing capabilities at Home Depot that aligned omni-channel pricing strategies to streamline fragmented systems. The result: an integrated workflow that empowered merchants to drive regional strategy, protected margins, and projected to deliver over $40M in annual impact.
THE CHALLENGE
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Online-only products and appliance services use a fixed national pricing model, which had long been an issue as these categories had the potential financial impact if we could get away from this model national pricing model and move towards a localized pricing model.
The business needed a solution that would not only support store-specific (regional) pricing for online and appliance install services, but also create a unified workflow aligned with the store-level pricing model. This alignment was essential to streamline merchant tasks and support Home Depot’s broader enterprise omni-channel pricing strategy, ensuring consistency, flexibility and scalability across all selling channels.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
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The goal was to identify the value, challenges, and requirements for implementing regional pricing.
Use Cases & Impact
Understand use cases and value propositions for enabling regional pricing for Online, Appliances products, and install services.
Key Factors
Identify any challenges/dependencies associated with enabling regional pricing.
Intended Experience
Explore requirements with
merchants to solution for regional pricing in the THD price management tool.
Hypothesis
My assumption going into the research was that the existing store-level pricing solution may help support the online-level regional pricing needs, and therefore the same model and workflow can be used to solve for those use cases.
Methodology
I conducted stakeholder interviews with 13 participants across online and appliance teams to understand unique departmental pain points around current national pricing model and their category-specific business needs and use cases for regional pricing.
In addition to uncovering user painpoints, I also asked specific questions pertaining to current store-level pricing processes and solutions to determine if the current store-level model pertains to their
Key Insights
Pricing mismatches were particularly painful in regions with:
Higher service install costs (leading to loss of sales)
Freight-heavy categories (leading to Increased shipping losses)
Local competitors (leading to poor competitiveness and loss of sales)
Shipping Costs: Merchants needed pricing flexibility to offset regional freight costs.
Competitive Pricing: Regional pricing was essential to compete with nearby retailers.
Install Costs: National pricing models led to losses or uncompetitive install fees.
Design Recommendations
Zone-Level Pricing: Group stores by region to reflect shipping and market conditions.
SKU-Level Control: Allow merchants to set prices per SKU per region.
Inquiry Worksheet Generator: Enable easy access to zone/SKU data for price updates.
Adders/Reducers: Optional tools for flexible price adjustments.
User Validation
Zone-Level Pricing: Group stores by region to reflect shipping and market conditions.
SKU-Level Control: Allow merchants to set prices per SKU per region.
Inquiry Worksheet Generator: Enable easy access to zone/SKU data for price updates.
Adders/Reducers: Optional tools for flexible price adjustments.
STRATEGY & HANDOFF
Prioritizing Requirements
1. Localized Pricing at the SKU-Level
Enable merchants to set store or zone-specific prices for both products and services.
Built around existing PaCMan Core infrastructure (avoiding major re-platforming).
2. Inquiry Worksheet Generator
Add ability to pull zone-level data for price uploads.
Empowers merchants to manage pricing at a granular level with fewer errors.
3. Flexible Pricing Models
Implement Base Price + Adders/Reducers model.
Allows dynamic retail calculation for installs and bulk items.
4. Support UX Change Management
Proposed onboarding and training plan for SOMAs and MSAs adapting to localized price input.
Development
Estimated $30M annual impact for Appliances & Complex Install
$10M in gross margin improvement for Millwork
Improved customer satisfaction through fairer, regionally accurate pricing
RESULTS
Projected Impact
Estimated $30M annual impact for Appliances & Complex Install
$10M in gross margin improvement for Millwork
Improved customer satisfaction through fairer, regionally accurate pricing