Chewy
Autoship

Autoship subscriptions are Chewy’s largest revenue driver, facilitating ~75% of net sales. Yet, a critical flaw in its design left customers frustrated and frequently canceling their subscriptions.

As it turns out, customers really do want to just set it and forget it—Autoship promises regular recurring delivery of pet medication, food, supplies, and treats on a schedule of the user’s choice. For Chewy pet parents, that generally means getting food once a month, flea meds quarterly, and the rest sporadically throughout. It’s easy to opt into Autoship during checkout, and the service is supported by a management portal and email-based notifications.

However, customers struggled to rely on the system, often finding themselves spending more time coordinating restocks than focusing on their pets. The legacy basket-enrollment model simplified initial setup by allowing customers to apply a recurring order agreement to an entire order, but it posed significant challenges for managing individual items. Customers frequently found that their needs for specific items, such as pet food, did not align with the cadence of other items, like medications—and the management interface didn’t allow individual items to be rescheduled.

Serving as Staff Designer for Autoship Management, alongside my partner dedicated to Acquisition, we formed a working group with PMs and Engineering leads to define the new service architecture and operating principles for a subscription service driven by individual item scheduling. At the core of our negotiations were trade-offs between convenience and control for both the customer and the business, such as reducing single-item shipments through consolidation and simplifying rescheduling flows.

In the legacy interface, many customers resorted to canceling Autoship orders and using the cart when they couldn’t adjust timing to their needs. While this appeared as a high rate of churn quantitatively, UX research provided the full picture and helped define the customer mental model. Our redesign empowered customers to manage Autoship the way they think about grocery shopping—stocking up when needed, skipping when they don’t.

With the shift to item-level Autoship, the order construct became an event rather than the pattern. Items could ship together one month but recur only when needed. I expanded flows for customers looking to expedite their orders and simplified the process to postpone. Most critically, we ensured that customers just starting their Autoship subscriptions weren’t locked into receiving the same basket mix every month.

Though the updated interface aligned more closely with the customer's need to manage item frequency independently, we soon discovered other frustrations with the service—many tied to order processing mechanisms and backend timing.

Patterns emerged regarding service areas that primarily relied on email as the customer-facing communication device. Autoship emails had no single owner, and they had been designed by several stakeholders, often without support from the CX or design team.

Creating a comprehensive timeline of our processes and email triggers helped frame customer frustrations—and pinpoint specific backend inefficiencies. Reminder email timing was tight, giving customers only 48 hours to make amendments. Many Autoship customers reached out for support upon seeing the authorization charge, which wasn’t mentioned in the interface or emails. Most surprisingly, while we promoted Autoship as a way to prioritize stock, we weren’t actually reserving inventory for Autoship customers.

Improving the Autoship process required negotiations with payments, fulfillment, and stock teams. We introduced additional look-ahead services, allowing us to lock in customer prices and reserve stock the moment the reminder email was sent. This revision doubled the time customers had to edit their order, providing a clear picture of what was in stock before being charged. Authorization amounts better matched the final order total, and we ensured order processing worked ahead, in sync with each customer’s Autoship settings.

As new services rolled out, emails were updated incrementally, but our first win was limiting messaging during order processing to clearly communicate our authorization hold procedure. This alone reduced negative customer contacts and email replies by 27.75%.