Product Design
Costco x Apple Digital Tickets
A screen embedded in Costco's Apple display tables, replacing manual paper price tags and the old print-a-ticket purchase flow with a live, synced experience. Built in partnership with Apple, now in pilot across Costco locations nationwide.
Client: Costco, in partnership with Apple
Timeline: 4 weeks
My Role: Lead Product Designer
Costco's in-store Apple displays relied on manually printed price tags and a shared tablet-and-printer ticket station. I led the phase that let shoppers browse every in-stock configuration of a product, not just what was sitting on the table, and replaced clunky dropdown menus with a simple drawer interaction. Now in pilot across Costco locations.
The Problem
Every day, associates print price tags by hand and slide them into acrylic holders. It's slow, it's manual, and there's no fast way to flag something as sold out. A shopper just finds an empty spot on the table and has to guess.
Buying an Apple product meant something similar: walk to a shared tablet and printer off to the side of the table, find what you want, print a ticket, bring it to the front. It worked, but it broke the natural rhythm of browsing. You weren't shopping, you were operating a kiosk.
The Fix
Once I took over as lead, the goal was clear: let shoppers see everything in stock, not just what's on the table in front of them, without losing what made the first version work.
Instead of packing options onto one screen, I moved them behind one clear, tappable link, added alongside a new "more details" button for product info. Tapping it opened a drawer showing other configurations in that product line, each with a color swatch for quick scanning. After talking it through with Costco, we agreed to hide anything not actually in stock in that store, so shoppers never landed on an option they couldn't buy that day.
Built to Handle the Real World
An associate mode is created and accessed by holding the product ID number for 5 seconds to access it, a deliberate barrier so shoppers can't stumble into it by accident. Associates can manually update price and stock, mark a unit as a floor demo so it auto-flags as out of stock once real inventory hits zero, and check when the device was last online to judge how current the pricing is. Any manual price change made offline resets automatically once the device reconnects.
Associate Modes
Online
Offline
Product Overide
Changing prices
Changing stock
Inventory states
Out of stock products
Low stock products
Product specific video loops to reduce screen burn
Where It Stands
The program is in pilot, with Costco store managers nationwide showing strong interest. Apple and Costco are finalizing pricing details before wider rollout. The system it replaces is still live in over 500 Costco locations worldwide, which gives a sense of the scale this could reach if it moves forward.
A walkthrough of the experience from our CEO, showing how it works from a shopper's first glance to checkout.