• Organization: Amazon Webtore (2012)
• My role: Senior UX Designer for Listings, Store Setup, Settings
• Additional Credits: Manager: Alley Rutzel. User Researchers: Ben Babcock, Bob Silverstein, Julie Lauzon (Amazon Merchants). TPM: Tridiv Vasavada. Program Manager: Jeff Thomas.
• Resources: AWS Amazon Webstore / Webstore shut down

Background

The Amazon Webstore product was a self-service website creation tool that allowed sellers to put their products up for sale on Amazon and their own store at the same time. When I joined, their business model had been changed from targeting a few large, enterprise sellers (like Izod and Samsonite) to accomodating many small and medium-sized sellers with very different needs and demands. As a Senior UX Designer for Webstore, my area of focus was Product Listings ("Catalog"), Store Settings (shipping, tax, payment, etc.), and Registration/Setup for the US, UK, Asia, and Europe. I became the SME (subject matter expert) on product inventory listing, and assisted the Amazon Seller team with their Listings Manager design needs. Amazon Webstore service has since been shutdown.

Problem

When I came onboard, we had some data that indicated that launched stores were not successful to the level expected, and there were many complaints from Webstore sellers about the product listing process. Products were taking too long to appear.

Research and Design Process

I participated with our user researcher who led a field study to understand sellers' profiles and task flows, and pain points. We setup weekly checkins with customer service to track customer contacts, and conducted monthly satisfaction surveys to rate our progress. Through this, we identified some of the larger inventory issues, such as the mis-ordering of category creation that was keeping products from appearing for days, and issues with the product import uploads. We then conducted usability tests on prototypes that I created of new features and upgrades, and applied the findings and recommendations to the designs prior to launch.

Measures for Success

1. Increase stores launched per week
2. Increase number of sellers onboarded
3. Increase stores launched per week
4. Increase seller satisfaction rate to High
5. Increase products added to Amazon
6. Decrease listings with errors per week
7. Release key new features every 90 days

Key Challenges

Redirecting development team priorities required working closely with development managers and product management to agree on the most pressing needs to improve the success measures for our sellers. I had to design new features that were already on our roadmaps, while pressing to the forefront the usability issues that needed to be addressed, and providing redesigns for those while fitting those fixes into the sprints. In addition, mobile solutions to store management was not resourced during this process.

Solutions

While staying within the existing design patterns and style library, I created wireframes and high fidelity mocks for new design patterns for inventory management, recommended ways to fix usability issues, and helped the development teams and leadership prioritize sprint tasks. Projects included:

1. New Setup Wizard: Changed from an 11-step pipeline to a 6-step tabbed wizard that moved the seller directly into launching an active store, but allowed jumping back and forth if a step required assistance from multiple staff.


2. Search, Match, Sell: Added the ability for sellers to search in the Inventory Manager for products in Amazon to sell, rather than looking them up on Amazon and copying each ASIN manually.


3. Tabular Data Interface Improvements: Added search filters, bottom pagination, inline editing, and auto-sorted by the latest products at the top of the list rather than the bottom (which was often many pages out of view).


4. Batch Editing: Allowed changes to be made to masses of products at once.


5. Category Creation Improvements: Allowed new categories to be created from within the Inventory Manager before a product was submitted, so that products would appear faster and with fewer errors.


6. Upload Inventory Template Improvements: Reorganized and changed columns and help text.


7. Clone product: Allowed Amazon Sellers (not Webstore) to duplicate a product rather than start from scratch.

Results

1. "Clone" nearly doubled the inventory added to Amazon in the first weeks after launch


2. Reduced customer service contacts for inventory management by 80% over 1.5 years


3. Increased the satisfaction ratings for inventory management to High


4. Increased the rate of stores being launched by more than 50%


5. Decreased the errors and missing data of products placed on Amazon