Overview
Promotions Manager is a powerful tool that eBay sellers can use to create and manage special offers for their buyers, such as discounts, free shipping, and other incentives.
To make Promotions Manager more accessible to all sellers, my team worked to make some of the key features available to both store subscribers and non-store subscribers within Active Listings and the New Listings tool.
This change has two benefits:
For non-store subscribers: It exposes them to promotion features that may encourage them to open a store subscription.
For store subscribers: It exposes them to promotion features that they may not be aware of.
Overall, this change is a win-win for both eBay and its sellers. It gives all sellers more tools to succeed, and it helps eBay to grow its marketplace.
My Role
UX Designer
Team Members
Elissa H. - Senior Designer
Jeremey C. - Design Lead
Annie Z. - Product Manager
Tuanh D. - Product Owner
Timeline
May 2019 - March 2020
"How can we increase the use of Promotions among eBay sellers?”
Within eBay Seller Hub, Promotions are exclusive offers that sellers can create to incentivize buyers to explore more of their listed items, increase their order values, and become repeat customers.
Sellers have the flexibility to craft various types of promotions, including:
Order discounts: Sellers can provide discounts to buyers who reach a specific spending threshold on their orders.
Coupons: Sellers have the option to generate coupons that buyers can redeem for discounts on their purchases.
Shipping discounts: Sellers can extend free or reduced shipping costs to attract more buyers.
Sale events: Sellers can host sale events, offering discounts on a selection of their listings.
Volume pricing discounts: Sellers can provide discounts to buyers who purchase multiple items.
However, two primary challenges exist:
- Non-store subscribers lack access to the Promotions Manager.
- Many store subscribers remain unaware of the Promotions Manager's potential in driving increased sales.
Building upon eBay's success with the integration of Promoted Listings into the new listing tool, my team embarked on the task of migrating other promotions to Active Listings.
Active Listings is a tool for managing all of your listings, including their prices, shipping options, and descriptions. You can also use Active Listings to create new listings and to edit existing listings.
Promotion Manager is a tool for creating and managing special offers such as discounts, free shipping, and other incentives. create a variety of different types of promotions, including order discounts, coupons, shipping discounts, sale events, and volume pricing.
New Listing Tool - The Easy Part
The first promotion selected for migration as our test case was Volume pricing.
The easiest part of the entire process was simply porting the same UI for Volume pricing over to the new listing tool. Similar to what we did with Promoted listings, we added Volume pricing to the "Sell it faster" section.
Using the same pattern as Promotions Manager here works for both new and veteran users.
The Hard Part - It Doesn't Scale
In the initial stages, integrating Volume Pricing into Active Listings seemed like a straightforward victory. I began preliminary designs on how to extend this integration to other promotions within Active Listings. However, our enthusiasm was met with questions from the team responsible for the Marketing section of Seller Hub. They were perplexed by the growing number of duplicate single-listing sale items being created daily.
Upon investigation, we realized our mental model for how sales operated was flawed. In reality, Sales served as containers, with listings being added to these Sales. When we allowed users to apply Volume Pricing to a single listing, it inadvertently created the impression that the listing itself was the container, and that Volume Pricing was merely a feature.
To further complicate matters, we had incorporated an editing feature into Volume Pricing. However, this editing feature turned out to be illusory. When a user chose to "edit" Volume Pricing, behind the scenes, it essentially deleted the current sale, created a new sale, and added the listing to this freshly created sale.
In theory, this might have seemed acceptable, as it had worked with Promoted Listings. Nevertheless, this approach proved unscalable, as it generated a significant number of single-listing sales in the Marketing section. Users could easily become perplexed when they encountered this surplus of sales, wondering, "Where did all these come from?" Introducing additional sales would only exacerbate the problem.
In response to these challenges, we convened both teams in a meeting room to collaboratively devise a scalable solution.
After long learning sessions and meetings, I suggested we simply copy the same mental model used in the Marketing section. Instead of adding Volume Pricing as a feature, let the user manage Sales from Active Listings. That way the user experience would be consistent across the platform.
We tried several types of designs, and tried to consider every type of complexity that could occur.
Managing Campaigns in Active Listings was too Complex
We tried many different ways to edit, add, and remove promotional campaigns from within Active Listings. But each time the solution would become a sprawling nightmare and a convoluted mess.
Is this listing already in another promotion? Can one item be in more than one promotion? Is this user a store subscriber or a non-store subscriber? That determines what controls we surface within Active Listings. The matrix of possible interactions just got completely out of control.
It was like we learned the hard way why the Campaign Manager was on a completely different section of Seller Hub.
Conclusions
Although we brainstormed numerous potential solutions, we couldn't reach a consensus on the best course of action at that moment. Bringing the other sales into Active Listings was temporarily halted, pending further research.
Nevertheless, we unanimously agreed that retaining Volume Pricing in Active Listings represented a valuable test case. Moving forward, it was evident that Volume Pricing on its own shouldn't pose significant issues.
This approach proved successful, resulting in a 0.11% increase in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) generation from non-store listings, an 8.3% boost in seller adoption, leading to a 6.5% improvement in triggered GMV. Overall, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, marking a significant achievement for the entire team.
What I Learned
This project was my first project at eBay and I was still getting my bearings. Reflecting on the experience, I realize the importance of conducting more in-depth research into the Sales functionality within Seller Hub.
If I had a better understanding of how the Sales worked from the beginning it would’ve saved a lot of time and ensured that I commenced the design process with the correct mental model from the outset. Perhaps then I could’ve designed a better experience for non-store subscribers to manage sales features from Active Listings without creating complications for the Store Subscribers who currently use the Marketing functions.
