Shipping on Marketplace
2019 • Marketplace on FB App, iOS & Android
Overview
In 2019, Marketplace pivoted from local C2C commerce to adding shipping. My team was brought onto the effort after the MVP was shipped to understand why the product was underperforming and grow the base of shipping sellers. We worked in a concentrated war room effort for ~5 months to understand their needs and rework core flows to meet them.
Team:
Designer | PM | EM | Content Strategist | 3 Engineers • 5mo
I was the lead designer for optimizing Onboarding, Listing Creation, and Order Management, and other teams owned the rest of the experience. The design work shown here is my own, and the impact here reflected is a direct result of that.
Identifying Pain Points
If our business problem was that Marketplace’s shipping service wasn’t reaching the target number of sellers, we needed to understand the user problems too. What were their pain points? I had to work without a UX researcher for this project, so I relied on my experienced content strategist Mindy who had seen research done for the first version to guide us.
Onboarding
A QP at the top of the MP feed opens onboarding.
The illustrated tutorial (by another designer) was made optional to make onboarding shorter.
Payment information was reviewable in 1 screen. Sellers were allowed to skip this step but would have to fill it out when they received their first order if they chose to skip it now.
At completion, we provide guidance for next steps, good seller behavior and prompt sellers to create a new shipped listing.
Creating Shipped Listings
A new 2nd step titled Delivery Method is introduced in for shipped listings after composing.
The Delivery Method page allows sellers to edit 3 fields:
Delivery Method
Location
Price: we provided a shortcut to edit item price once profit estimates are calculated
Experienced sellers who know their items’ shipping rates can enter the rate directly into the field and move on. Otherwise, sellers can tap the helper text to use our estimator to estimate shipping rates (by another designer).
Estimated total provides a clear breakdown of the shipping costs, selling fees, and seller’s profits (by another designer).
Order Management
I proposed a new filter pattern I found elsewhere in the app to sort orders.
The filter sheet’s options are ordered by urgency of action.
A seller with any orders waiting to go out is defaulted to the Waiting to be Shipped view. Sellers have a limited window of time to ship out an order before it’s automatically canceled, refunded, and penalized.
If no orders are waiting to be shipped out, the default view will be All Orders, which will show a simple reverse chronological view of all orders a seller has ever received.
I reduced 3-4 colors for different order statuses to 2 in order to reduce cognitive load: only showing color at all for the statuses that needed impending/immediate action from the seller, which are Waiting to be Shipped and Pending.
Results
Our impact was incredible. After my team came out of the war room, we had:
43k
sellers onboarded
compared to < 1k total prior
69k
active listings with 543 created daily, against a goal of 34K
compared to 1.6k total, ~3 daily prior
24%
seller listing completion rate
compared to 5% prior