Did you know that over 50% of the stuff you buy on Amazon come from third-party sellers?
In 2019 this is where potential sellers in Europe had to go to find information and be inspired to register.
The problem
The overall experience was disjointed and confusing. This huge website was extremely hard to navigate and users were not finding the information they need. Futhermore, the site design was very old fashioned. That lead to users looking for information elsewhere. Resulting in huge bounce and exit rates, low conversions and most importantly not the experience approapriate for Amazon.
So, the Amazon sellers deserved something better. In the end of 2019 our team in Proximity was tasked with helping Amazon improve their European seller-facing website which gives their potential sellers an overview of why they should sell on Amazon and all the programs designed to help sellers no matter what, where and to whom they want to sell.
Discover
First of all we wanted to understand the sellers. We combined the analysis of the available quantitative data with guerilla user testing which helped us translate data patterns into actionable insights.
We then validated these insights through social listening, desk research and by actively participating in existing seller communities online. This research was, of course, complemented by a heuristics analysis to identify design and usability flaws.
And of course no discovery phase can be complete without looking at the competitors and analysing how they address this challenge.
That phase resulted in 3 data-driven personas, 3 data-driven comprehensive user journeys, a set of design principles to guide us and lots of empathy in the team.
Having all this data mapped out we identified who our users are, their pain points and needs. We then identified areas for improvement and the areas that were working really well. Based on that we had a clear understanding of how the website should be structured and what our main user flows should be.
Solution
Using all of our learnings from the discovery phase, together with the Amazon team we went through a few different iterations of the new website structure and we finally settled on one that we thought would best fit our solution definition as well as is consistent with Amazon North America.
Now, on our hands we had a scope that consisted of 5 marketplaces - 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 🇪🇸 🇮🇹, each with different language, different user behaviour, different services offered by Amazon and different tax regulations. And let’s not forget this is Amazon - a site visited by hundreds of thousands of users. So no mistakes were allowed.
We have audited, revised, recreated, redesigned, sometimes killed or created from scratch every single piece of content in all of those 5 marketplaces - every text, every link, every video, every pdf.
That, complemented by a full visual redesign, resulted in the best version Amazon marketplace Europe has ever had.
Testing and results
Being Amazon, one of the most data-driven companies I know, we tested how the new site performs. We tested the new site versus the old and we realized that the new site was much more liked by the customers as well as it is much easier to find the necessary information. You can see the new site at sell.amazon.co.uk
My role
I helped the team with defining and designing the final solution. That includes working with our strategists to prepare the sitemaps and content hierarchies as well as briefs for copywriters and mockups.
In addition to that I worked closely with the the account managers to present the insights from the discovery phase to Amazon stakeholders and how those informed our solution. Large part of my role as well was to work closely with the project manager to scope the production phase of the project so we can stay agile, re-use as much as possible, be as efficient as possible and most importantly deliver on time.