B2B Contract Self-Service Enablement for Global Athletics Brand
Company: Nike (Nike.net)
Role: Senior Product Designer
Focus: Research, workflow design, UX/UI
Time Period: 2019
Nike’s wholesale retailers don’t order the way a shopper does. They negotiate contracts up front; agreed products, prices and delivery windows — and then “call off” against those contracts as they need stock. On Nike.net, that call off process ran through a person: a retailer built a spreadsheet, emailed it to a customer service representative, and the CSR keyed it into Nike’s order system. When something didn’t match, the CSR picked up the phone.
The goal was to take the CSR out of the middle and let retailers enter their own contract call offs, on their own timeline. For Nike, that meant fewer people absorbing manual order entry. For the retailer, it meant direct control over their own orders.
Overview
The Challenge
Enable retailers to self-serve without ignoring how retailers actually work or shifting manual effort elsewhere in the system. Before self-service call offs:
There was no shared file format; different columns, different languages, different ordering, and no two files structured alike.
Order volume made manual entry untenable. One retailer’s file covered seven ship-tos; a single store within it carried 11 contracts, 85 unique product codes, and 271 units across 149 line items — on one call off.
Errors surfaced to the wrong person. When a file was wrong, the error reached a CSR who hadn’t made it, who then had to call the person who had. Every mistake became a phone call.
The CSR was a required step in every transaction, which capped how fast a retailer could order and how many orders Nike could absorb.
Design Strategy
Return the error to the person who can actually fix it.
Key principles:
Meet retailers where they already work. They order in spreadsheets, so keep the file; don’t force a 149-line order in a click-by-click interface.
Pre-fill everything Nike already knows. A downloaded contract file should arrive bundled with a dynamic upload template so the retailer only completes what’s genuinely theirs to enter.
Route validation back to the author. Errors return to the retailer, not to a CSR, closing the loop without a phone call.
Design the failure case first. A success state is easy; the screen that matters is a 149 line file with problems scattered through it.
My Role
I led the work end to end, including
Primary research, collection and analysis of the files retailers were actually sending
Current state workflow mapping and three future-state wireframes.
End to end UX for the download and upload flows, including all error and edge-case states.
I started by collecting what retailers were sending and mapping the current-state flow, color-coding every step as current state, future state, or outside the system. That coding made the CSR dependency impossible to hide, and reframed the project: the spreadsheet wasn’t the real failure, the error loop was.
I then mapped three options, including the tradeoffs of the options I didn’t recommend. Option A kept the file exchange and added validation, but simple errors still routed to a CSR who fixed them in iDoc… it moved the work around without removing it. Option B eliminated the file entirely, with retailers selecting products from each contract in the tool and entering quantities by size: the cleanest end state, but by far the largest build and, for a 149-line order, a great deal of clicking. Option C went after the error loop instead. Option C shipped.
Outcomes
What didn’t land:
We weren’t able to fully remove the need for excel files in the process. A full in-tool entry, appropriately iterated on until a significant reduction in clicks (appropriate bulk actions, search and system flexibility) was out of scope from both a UX perspective and an engineering one.
What worked:
Contract call offs shipped on Nike.net as a self-service flow.
Retailers submit on their own timelines, without waiting on a customer service representative.
Validation errors return to the person who can actually correct them, removing the phone call from the correction loop.
The pre-filled contract template absorbed the format and language variance across markets (Korea, Australia, Latin America) without asking retailers to change how they work.
The CSR is no longer a required step in the transaction.
