Item Variants
2019 — 2020 • Facebook Marketplace on iOS & Android
Overview
International user research showed sellers were already trying to sell item variants (a t-shirt in different sizes and colors vs. a single size, single-style t-shirt) on Marketplace even though it took up a lot of time to manage these listings and answer buyer messages to reach a transaction this way. Item Variants empowers sellers to showcase all their product styles in a first-class e-commerce experience on Marketplace while reducing the amount of time it takes for them to complete each transaction.
Team:
Designer | PM | UX Researcher | Data Scientist | 3 Engineers • 7mo
I drove strategy and project management from conception through pitch and resourcing, where we added the rest of the XFN only in the last half for execution.
Problem: No Listing Flexibility
Target Sellers: Almost-Professional Segments
Make up majority of sellers in APAC & LATAM, a growing segment
Limited to and prefer selling on mobile
Depending on MP for a regular part of their income, using MP because free to list
Expect to deliver 99% of sales through local courier services
A listing for a sweater from Jakarta, Indonesia with variants. The seller creates their own edited
images to showcase options.
Buyers must scroll all the way to the description to find out about item variant information, which
comes after the message box.
Actionable Problems:
Sellers with item variants spend extra time having to suss out which particular variant a buyer is interested in through messaging.
Sellers want to list different item variants at different prices, so they’re still marking these entire listings as “free.” This confuses buyers and our backend.
Buyers can’t use search or filters to find specific item variants from sellers because Marketplace isn’t capturing data in a structured manner.
User Expectations
Sellers prefer grouping item variations together in a single listing
During management, sellers sometimes edited their listing photos and actually crossed out any item variants that were out of stock. However, Marketplace’s current structure assumes 1 item type only.
Strategy: Variability
Problem:
Sellers trying to list item variants on Marketplace encounter difficulty due lack of listing flexibility.
Solution:
Empower sellers to list varied inventory by shifting MP from a Craigslist model to an e-commerce system.
Measuring Success
Ship goal, guardrailed against standard Seller metrics (listing creation, active sellers, etc).
Decision: Unstructured/Structured
The first major product decision I drove for our team was choosing either Unstructured vs. Structured Variants, which would set us down exclusive paths for user experience and
backend implementation.
The research:
Categories most likely to have variant listings were clothing, shoes and accessories
Number of variations could be immense
It was clear that Structured Variants would save time for many variations.
Final UX —
Variant Creation
Once sellers choose a category known to be likely to have variants, a NUX is shown.
Sellers are asked to pick the item variant or create their own custom variant.
Now sellers enter freeform options for the variant. (Item variant is “Color,” options are “Coral, Dusty Pink,” etc.)
The MP composer automatically builds the inventory table as sellers type variant data.
Price and availability is managed at a per-option level.
Management
A seller opens a variant listing to its management page.
They can manage availability of variations on the item management page or from within the Edit Composer.
Within the Edit Composer, sellers can add or delete entire attributes or options from their listing (which will then delete all the associated variations) or delete individual variations.
Results
These are results after our global launch of “local” Variants, after which we worked on enabling Variant listings for our US shipped service sellers.
4 Million+
Variant listings created in launch half, with greatest usage in APAC & LatAm as scoped
2%
global listings are Variant listings as of Feb 2022
30K
listings daily increasing overall Marketplace listings
Future Work —
Custom Photos
The team didn’t get around to building this custom photos UX due to time constraints, but our stretch goal was to build the ability to assign photos per variant on the seller experience. This would enable buyers to see the correct photo when they select the variant they want to buy/inquire about to further build confidence in their transaction.
Add Photo entrypoints are added per inventory option.
Sellers may choose from photos already uploaded within the listing or new photos from their device.
Sellers may assign the same photo to several inventory options.