PC Express Service Redesign: From Missing Items to Trusted Delivery

PC Express is built for convenience.

How might we prevent the loss of items while establishing transparency and trust in PC Express?

Customer Experience

We started by becoming customers ourselves and by collecting real feedback from people who use PC Express. The stories were consistent: missing items with no explanation, out-of-stock surprises, and no clear in-app path to report problems.

To broaden our evidence base, we also crawled 2,237 negative user feedback from the App Store and Google Play, then translated recurring complaints into a pain-point word cloud to capture what users struggle with most.

The problem isn’t just customer-side

At first, it looked like a customer experience issue.

But the deeper we looked, the clearer it became: this problem was multisided.

To validate what we were seeing, we spoke with members of the PC Express UX team at Loblaw. Their perspective helped us surface operational pain points behind the scenes, especially around shift handoffs, duplicated picking, and missing-item accountability.

We analyzed customer and colleague workflows, then synthesized key pain points into a PC Express Service Map to capture the service journey from discovery to support.

We’ve marked the areas of friction in red and highlighted them in yellow for easy reference.

Metrics that matter

We learned from the Loblaw team that PC Express tracks two key metrics: Perfect Order and OSAT.

Perfect Order measures order accuracy and issue-free deliveries, but can unfairly penalize colleagues for out-of-stock items beyond their control.

OSAT reflects overall satisfaction, where key pain points include missing items, limited order status notifications, and inconsistent support.

Our goal is to improve accuracy and transparency while keeping the process fair for teams.

Optimization 1: Transparency

To improve transparency on the customer side, we redesigned stock labels to clearly distinguish regular, low-stock, and out-of-stock states.

We also encouraged users to save unavailable items in a Restock Wishlist, and prompted substitutions when inventory runs low to reduce uncertainty before checkout.

For example, A customer browsing Strawberry Jam can instantly see it is Low Stock, receive a prompt to select substitutions, and if an item becomes Out of Stock, they can save it to the Restock Wishlist for future restock alerts.

Optimization 2: Customizable Substitution & Final Price Range

To reduce uncertainty around substitutions, we introduced a customizable preference flow for low-stock items.

Customers can select up to 3 ranked substitutes using keywords, and view an estimated final price range at checkout, improving transparency and preventing unexpected charges.