Helping Sellers Succeed

Understanding the Problem

The majority of Bonanza sellers have stores on eBay and other marketplaces. They come to Bonanza because they’re looking to expand their business and find another venue for selling online. In 2016, Bonanza’s product, retention, and support teams came together to look at ways to improve the experience for eBay sellers. We identified a few key challenges:

• In our 2016 seller survey, sellers described “managing inventory between eBay and Bonanza” as both most time-consuming activity and biggest pain point.

• eBay Alternative is our most viewed landing page, but had declining signup rates. Our retention team suggested that the content might not be relevant. Sellers weren’t that interested in awards and features. Instead, they wanted to feel confident Bonanza was low-risk, easy to manage, and likely to generate sales.

• The eBay importer, used by 70% of Bonanza sellers, is the most common way to upload inventory. We received numerous bug reports each week, many attributed to confusing language or lack of feedback on import progress instead of technical problems.

• Support ticket data revealed the eBay importer also generated many help requests. We found that sellers unsure what many settings meant, didn’t know whether their import had completed, and didn’t understand what was being imported. Retention backed this up, saying that even savvy sellers were often confused and overwhelmed when first using the tool.

Identifying User Outcomes

As the project director and lead UX designer, I worked with our product, retention, and support teams to identify the user outcomes we wanted to achieve. We framed these as user stories that we’d use throughout the projects.

As an eBay seller, I want to:

• Understand what Bonanza offers and how it compares to eBay

• Try Bonanza without investing extra time or money to get started

• Manage inventory easily and predictably across different eBay and Bonanza

We also set up some internal goals to help quantify success. These included:

• Maintaining high Google search ranking for the eBay Alternative landing page

• Increasing signups from the eBay Alternative landing page

• Increasing percentage of successful eBay imports

• Reducing support tickets and negative feedback related to the eBay importer

• Improving seller satisfaction for onboarding and imports in the 2017 survey

Designing Solutions

eBay Alternative Landing Page

Before starting design, I spent a couple weeks researching why sellers want to leave eBay. I talked to our Support and Retention teams about common pain points and goals that they were hearing from new users. And I read through online forums, articles from related searches, and seller surveys to see users are reading and saying about eBay and other marketplaces. This helped to frame the content and design for the new page:

• Focused on how Bonanza can address specific pain points around fees, marketing, inventory control, and getting started selling online

• Added trust indicators, such as reviews, testimonials, and press

• Wrote copy using a list of targeted keywords and terms sellers were familiar with

• Gave users options to set a booth or start with one of our importing tools

• Added illustrations (done by me and illustrator Jason Custer) to give the page a bright, friendly new look

eBay Importer

The eBay importer was one of our most complex backend tools, and the user interface reflected this. There was a lot of text, several hidden options, inconsistent inputs, and unpredictable system feedback. The look and feel of the page was fairly dated and didn’t seem to inspire seller confidence.Working closely with support and retention, I designed a new interface and workflow, which focused on these goals:

• Clarifying language. Support, retention, and I reviewed the existing pages and made notes about what tended to trip sellers up. We worked together to come up with terminology that aligned with the terms they were using when communicating their frustrations to our team. We also worked on simplifying the tool tips and helper text, so we didn’t overwhelm sellers.

• Simplifying the user interface. Though “making it look better” was an obvious goal, I also wanted to improve the hierarchy, make actions more visible, and use consistent inputs throughout the workflow.

• Providing visual feedback. Seller often wrote in asking about import progress, why certain items imported, and any errors or slowdowns. This way, if the system was slow or buggy, sellers would understand what was going on.

Measuring and Learning

Results

• The new landing page increased signups by 2x. We ran several A/B tests between old and new versions of the page, and it was a success.

• The landing page continued to rank in the top 1–5 results for keywords we were targeting (e.g. “ebay alternative”). Though this wasn’t an improvement, maintaining our ranking was still a success. This was also personally gratifying, as it was the first real SEO project I worked on.

• The eBay importer had a slight increase in imports among active sellers. However, it was still challenging as a first step for new sellers. When we tested directing users to the import screen vs. the normal signup flow, signups decreased by 15%.

• Support tickets for the importing decreased significantly. We attributed some of this to directing users to help content before contacting support, but it did seem like the new design reduced confusion among those who wrote in or talked to retention.

• The last 3 seller surveys indicate that importing is a challenge, but no longer the top pain point for sellers. As a side benefit, the new design made it easier for teams to identify and fix bugs. Retention confirmed this, saying that new sellers need much more help with advertising and analytics than with import troubleshooting.

WHAT DID WE LEARN?

• Improving content makes a difference. The revised landing page did a better job of describing what Bonanza offered and matching this with what sellers were looking for. It made it easier to go from being interested to opening a Bonanza booth.

• The eBay importer is still complicated. It's unclear whether the settings and options are all needed, or expressed in the clearest way. There are also technical challenges, such as import queues and field suppression, that aren't easy to solve by design alone.

• Qualitative research is important. We relied on analytics, support tickets, and passive feedback as ways of understanding the problem and measuring success. These were insightful, but felt limited. We made assumptions about why users were struggling, but had a hard time backing them up. As we’re looking ahead to similar projects in 2019, we want to do interviews and walkthroughs with sellers, so we can understand how they’re using the tools.