Self-service Inventory Uploading in Marketplace
“Vendors can now submit bulk inventory deals to Amazon at any time and on their own terms.”
Project Type
Launch a new feature
Renew design system
Duration
October, 2018 - January 2019
Tools
Sketch
Invision
Balsamiq
Omnigraffle
My Role
User interview
User journey mapping
Low/high-fidelity mockups
Design system
Post-launch user feedback
OVERVIEW
Background
Vendor self-service inventory management
Self-service inventory management program (called Born to Run and Spectra programs) launched in 2018, is intended to improve the merchants offer submission process. This project is one of the biggest program launches and challenges in 2018.
Improved user experience gives Amazon suppliers flexibilities to upload their coupons and deals to amazon.com at any time and in a way that makes sense for their business. The merchants can offer a set of products to Amazon, decide on the quantity, price, staging and shipping time, and Amazon will either accept their offer or respond with a counter offer that benefits both parties.
Target User
Project Goal
My Role
UX Requirements and Goal
Vendors and sellers who are preparing for selling their products through Amazon fulfillment, as well as trying to figure out a way to accelerate sales of items that they currently list at Amazon.
Support vendors to submit bulk inventory deals to Amazon at any time and on their own terms.
I designed and managed user experience in the Born-to-Run and Spectra projects from scratch: defining business goal, and performing user research and user interviews.
Redesign user flow and experience starting from ingress point design to data visualization to help users experience intuitive interaction for submission processes in Marketplace.
"Merchants can launch new products via this program without speaking with their program manager at Amazon.”
"Merchants can manage product stocks and track sales performance via this program.”
Project Process
Understand
RESEARCH
Learning Users and Business
From user interviews with users (or merchants) and behavioral research, I learned about users’ key pain points and needs for a better submission experience:
Up until now, merchants received weekly purchase orders or large bulk orders, but that did not always work for them.
I'd love to do more business with Amazon and I’ve received plenty of bulk purchase requests in the past, but they always seem to pop up when I am traveling or too busy to review the requests
-Rolando Salanzar, vendor in shoes category
I like the idea of getting orders with advance notice and shipping in bulk, but the discounts requested are so high that they would put me out of business!
-Dorothy Burton, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of sporting items.
Redefine Product and
Problem Solving
What problem are we solving by launching this program?
increasing our reliance on automated deal evaluation is necessary to scale and keep up with customer demand. Automation allows us to evaluate deals in a way that doesn’t require manual inputs from the retail teams, thus increasing speed and efficiency.
How will this raise the bar for the vendor experience?
Currently, sourcing – especially in large quantities – is a one way process in which vendors have little to no say in the terms of an offer. With bulk buys, they can lower item quantities, but they are not allowed to make a counter offer and modify other parameters, such as price or shipping window. This is a frustrating experience for vendors who are interested in offering one-time deals to Amazon, but are unable to meet our discount asks, do not have enough time to ship inventory or review the offer, or would like to offer similar products. Self-Service Inventory Deals gives them more convenience to submit deals on their own timeline and taking into account their requirements.
What is the business opportunity?
We estimate that the self-service application will generate an additional $25-40MM savings WW in the first 12 months based on 2017 Spectra data and the following assumptions.
Current UI Issues
I address a potential problem in the inventory submission process of the existing system:
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the submission process used to be manual and tend to cause errors.
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the submission process looks very simple. click submit button and download a spreadsheet and fill out inventory information. And then upload the spreadsheet. But there are a lot of errors and back-and-forth when uploading inventory information.
DESIGN EXPERIENCE
Understand Technical Feasibility/Requirements
Discuss requirements at the beginning before jumping into wireframed-UI.
1
On the landing page, there are offers that Amazon provides to vendors. Users select one of the offers.
2
Users select their vendor code and add items to sell in the detail page.
3
New self-service feature for uploading inventory lists, instead of manually using spreadsheets.
4
Submit or go back to edit the list.
5
The final page contains indicators showing the submission status and submitted item list.
Propose Optimal Submission Process
Show user’s motivations, frustrations, and goals in customer journey map starting from program homepage to post-submission status
Unhappy path: spreadsheets need to be revised and re-uploaded.
Happy path: spreadsheets are successfully submitted by using the proposed self-service feature.
The lower part of the map represents an unhappy path that might include submission errors and a number of action steps required to upload inventory lists. The upper part of the map reflects my proposal and a happy path, which optimize user action steps and reduce pain points.
Wireframed UI
The wireframed UI meets the technical requirements. As compared to the first paper-based mockup, the proposed UI contains clear and easy interaction to upload and submit inventories.
1
On the landing page, there are offers that Amazon provides to vendors. Users select one of the offers and go to the offer page.
2
3
Users select vendor code and add items in the detail page.
A new self-service feature for uploading inventory lists, instead of manually using spreadsheet (marked with blue circle in the mock).
4
Submit or go back to edit
5
The final page contains indicators showing the submission status and submitted items list.
Apply New Design System
Since the current design system has a limitation in embedding complicated interactions on the vendor platform, I applied this new design system that I worked on to this project. (Please find 'Design System' in my portfolio.)
Design system examples
Final UX
Per traffic monitoring for 3 months post program launch, the improved UX design resulted in 35% point increase (from 10% to 45%) in user traffic or a number of submissions through the system.
Previously, it was hard to understand where they were in the system flow. With my proposed design, I have introduced a navigation bar at the top of the page, so that each user will clearly understand that this is a 4 step process.
To solve the error issue, as shown on this page, I added an alternate way of uploading an inventory list with an add-a-product feature which only need product ASIN number, as opposed to full detail of products.
Once users add product number, the system automatically represents and visualizes the product data.
This is a summary of submitted programs which shows a different array of submission status: offers under review, active offers, and completed offers. This page has an aggregated view to show the summary for each offer, so users have a clear view of offers they have created.
NEXT STEPS
Next Version 2.
In 2020, we will expand globally, add additional filters and search, offer enhanced detail page content in V2.