Hershey Orders
The Hershey Company
Modernizing Hershey’s B2B experience
Hershey's Order Connection was The Hershey Company’s poorly regarded ordering portal for wholesale buyers, retailers, and partners.
Challenge – The portal was facing low adoption and retention due to poor navigation; search and browse; and ordering features.
Solution – I led a cross-functional team through the redesign of the legacy portal and definition of new market repositioning strategies.
Outcomes – Improved internal process recommendations and scaled product capabilities defined for reducing critical customer friction. Secured executive alignment and funding for internal implementation.
Approach
As Design Director, I led two parallel workstreams focused on product definition and the new digital experience, coordinating multidisciplinary teams, uniting efforts, and delivering a holistic solution.
Vision Setting (3w) – Conducted a series of stakeholder workshops to understand the business, gather industry insights, define KPIs, and align vision.
Discovery (6w) – Synthesized existing research and analytics. Conducted our own assessments, secondary research, and market analysis. Defined user segments, customer journeys, process maps, strategic opportunities, and key features.
Design (11w) – End-to-end design of the new digital experience and market positioning, inclusive of: optimized information architecture, visual direction, content strategy, product features, scaled capabilities, and go-to-market strategies. Usability testing was also conducted to validate solutions.
Excerpts from discovery readout.
Introducing Hershey Orders
We transformed Hershey's Online Order Connection into Hershey Orders, a personalized B2B commerce experience designed to meet the evolving needs of modern customers with authenticity, vibrancy, and optimism.
Product discovery
A key business goal was showcasing Hershey's portfolio of brands for wayfinding and customer credibility. I architected several touchpoints across the buyer journey to support this:
Featured brands/products surfaced via homepage scroll, seasonal nav link, and dropdown best sellers
CMS-driven carousels for featured products, personalized by buyer segment and region
Upsell recommendations placed throughout the page and cart, alongside item price and weight totals
Weight tracking
Hershey Orders requires customers to meet a minimum weight threshold to place an order, but there was no easy way to track progress toward meeting this requirement. We reduced this friction with several enhancements:
Standardized product imagery, Material ID, and quantity weight shown consistently across the experience
Persistent weight tracker for real-time visibility into order progress
Pricing and availability
Research consistently pointed to pricing and availability data not being called until checkout as one of the top reasons customers avoided the legacy portal.
I addressed this by working across the business to align stakeholders on moving the call up to the product detail page—balancing business cost against user impact.
Quick order
As Quick Order was found to be the most utilized feature of the legacy portal, I helped my team prioritize and design additional capabilities identified by our research.
Alternate item recommendations for out-of-stock products
Upselling and cross-selling with suggested products based on order
.CSV template for bulk ordering
I feel this is a strong design, visually appealing and comfortable, while at the same time intuitive and easy to use.”
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– Usability Testing Participant
Product value and activation
Given how strongly customers had rejected the legacy portal, Hershey Orders had to be positioned as completely new platform. I helped shape a new product identity and value story, designed to win over new users and rebuild trust with customers who had previously abandoned the old experience.
Positioned Hershey Orders as an innovative leader in snacking while staying rooted in Hershey's brand tradition
Grounded the strategy in a customer-first approach, informed by deep research into B2B customers' unique challenges and pain points
Developed the tagline "Business Made Sweeter" to clarify Hershey Orders' B2B context alongside Hershey's broader consumer business
Outcomes
Solution
KPI
Deep personalization across products, and content, and recommendations drive hyper-contextual value.
Transparent pricing and weight tracking increase confidence in ordering and decrease task time.
Increased engagement
Expanded capabilities for faster reordering and order management.
Expanded capabilities for merchandising, driven by customer segment, regionality, seasonality, and trends.
Increased returning visitors
Expanded merchandising and upselling touchpoints across global navigation, product listing pages, product detail pages, quick order, and cart.
Increased AOV