Improving Mobile Shopping

Understanding the Problem

The majority of Bonanza sessions happen on a mobile device. However, our mobile site hadn’t been updated in several years, which contributed declining engagement and conversion, and increasing complaints from buyers and sellers. I worked with our product manager, Reilly, to review our site analytics, and talked to support about the types of problems users had. We discovered that:

• Inconsistency between the desktop and mobile site caused confusion for sellers and buyers. Sellers couldn’t find important pages and tools and buyers seemed to have trouble moving around. Analytics revealed that buyers from Google Shopping (a significant traffic source) often landed on an item listing page, but then left the site.

• Buyers often missed key information on the page. It was common for buyers to get in touch with support to ask about condition, shipping timelines, and returns. This information was available on the page, but seemed to be buried or unclear.

• Search didn't work well on mobile. Analytics showed that site searches happened much less frequently on mobile than on the full site. And our own testing revealed that applying filters took several clicks and often over a minute to load results.

• Sellers who also sold on eBay, Amazon, or Etsy were frustrated that their brand was being diminished. One eBay seller, irritated with recent eBay changes to the listing page, commented that the owner of the mall doesn’t go into Macy’s at night and start moving the displays around. We wanted to make our changes minimally disruptive, and give sellers places to customize their listing and tell their story.

• Sellers were also invested in the buyer experience. Many would search for their own items to see where they placed in search results. In the seller survey and discussions with retention, sellers indicated that inconsistent or slow results made them feel less confident in Bonanza’s ability to market their products.

Identifying User Outcomes

As the project director and lead UX designer, I worked with product manager, support, and development team to figure out how we could approach these solving these problems. We wanted to be as precise as we could so we could improve the search, navigation, and browsing experiences without disrupting sellers and frequent buyers.

As a buyer, I want to:

• Find what I'm looking for quickly when I'm on my phone

• Understand what I'm buying and when it will arrive

• Trust that the person I’m buying from will deliver my item

As a seller, I want to:

• See that my products and categories are easy for buyers to find

• Customize my listing pages and provide helpful information to buyers

• Access and use important pages from my phone

• Know that Bonanza is working to get me traffic and sales

Success measurements:

• Increase conversion rate for the mobile listing page

• Increase mobile site search usage, duration, and conversion

• Reduce bounce and exit rates for Google Shopping traffic

• Reduce support tickets from buyers and sellers

Designing Solutions

Responsive Item Listing Page

The item listing page is Bonanza’s most viewed page, and often the first page that a new customer sees. It’s also an important page for sellers, who make adjustments to an item’s title, photos, pricing, traits, and description to get more traffic and sales. I designed a responsive listing template, which focused on these considerations:

• Improve the page’s hierarchy. Important information like shipping, item condition, return policy, and seller contact should be quickly visible.

• Keep the spotlight on the seller. Highlight the booth name, seller ratings, status so buyers can know and trust who they’re buying from. Include recommended items from the same seller, so they feel like the page is theirs.

• Let sellers customize. Make it easy to edit listing details, and ensure that the description section can accommodate the seller’s text, image, and formatting choices.

• Update the look and feel. We giving sellers some control, but we also want for the page to feel clean, friendly, and contemporary to appeal to new buyers. Minimize unnecessary elements and textures so that images, actions, and tags stand out.

Mobile heaDER AND Navigation

The existing navigation was functional but had some challenges. It organized links in different panels, which wasn’t obvious even to experienced sellers. It lacked important categories like computers and auto parts, which had become popular in recent years. And it didn’t include subcategories, which made it harder to browse specific items, like jerseys. I revised the header and navigation panel, focusing on these objectives:

• Consolidate links. Include shopping links, seller tools, and account links in a single navigation area. Use grouping and expanders to make it easy to scan.

• Include more links. Feature the same categories, subcategories, and shopping options as the full version of the site.

• Highlight links to dashboards. Display icons for booth, account, and message dashboards, and include counters to indicate sales and new mail.

• Create a space for key actions. Display buttons like add to cart, view cart, and check out in a persistent space at the bottom of the screen.

Mobile Search and filtering

Lastly, I worked with our dev team to understand what we could do to improve site search. Most of these changes focused on the user interface and search result loading:

• Make search easier to access. Allow users to open search from any screen, show current recent searches, and differentiate between closing the search panel and clearing the field.

• Ensure filters are usable on mobile. Include relevant filters for categories and subcategories, same as we do for the full site. Use checkboxes and radio buttons instead of dropdown menus to make choices visible and easy to click.

• Increase search speed. When a user selects a filter, load search results immediately behind the scenes so the results are ready when they exit. Allow users to select more than one filter before returning to results.

Measuring and Learning

RESULTS

• Mobile sessions with site search increased 6.9%. Duration and pages per session were relatively flat, but the fact that more people were using it was promising.

• Mobile conversions from site search increased 133%. This was a big success – it seemed like we’d helped more people find the item they were searching for. However, the new conversion rate was still just about 2%, so there was room for improvement.

• Changes to the listing page didn't have an impact on conversion immediately. The new modular layout made it easier to run A/B tests. Early tests, focused on trust, reviews, and urgency, improved conversion as much as 2–4% for specific audiences and categories.

• Support tickets related to listing pages declined, but only slightly. However, the response from support agents was positive. Buyer questions were often more specific – not the general confusion they’d experienced before.

what did we learn?

• Sellers could use better mobile tools. Though the navigation is more comprehensive, many seller tools we link to aren’t easy to use on mobile. Our mobile website and app could do a better job of letting sellers work on a small screen. Our seller survey and app ratings both indicate that working on mobile is critical for many sellers.

• Search is still a priority. In our 2019 seller survey, “improving search” was one of the top requests from sellers. This year, we’re taking a look at search improvements on desktop and mobile sites. Major goals include increasing speed, more accurate keyword matching, and refining filters for popular categories.

• Small changes over time work well. We didn’t experience any major negative response from users, which had been common with big releases in the past. Being able to measure changes after implementation and run tests made it easier to track the impact of our work.