FBA Conversion Redesign
The redesign of enrolling products into Fulfillment by Amazon process on sellercentral.amazon.com.
Platform: responsive web
My Role: the only designer
Timeframe: 2 months
Journey Mapping, Usability Study, Data-backed Redesign, UX Strategy
Sellers who sell products on Amazon and use FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) ship products to Amazon fulfillment centers, and enjoy the fast Prime delivery and customer service Amazon offers. Sellers have to enroll their products, whether new or existing ones, into Fulfillment by Amazon, which is the conversion experience. The current conversion flow is outdated, causing a lot of frictions, and disconnected from the overall FBA journey. A redesign is in need since the abandon rate of the conversion flow is very high (22.5% sessions were abandoned worldwide in 2019).
The Problem
Why redesign? Of course we want to increase the conversion success rate (reduce abandoned sessions), but first we need to get to the root of the problem: why are Sellers dropping the sessions?
Based on the initial audit of the current experience, and insights from previous research, I mapped out the frictions of the current flow with the product manager, and had the following assumptions:
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Discoverability issues: this is not directly connected to dropping (since Sellers didn't even find the ingress to the flow), but it's contributing to the low conversion rate
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Irrelevant and non-required information being asked throughout the process
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Usability issues: confusing actions and navigation
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Fragmented processes: again this is not directly related to dropping, but the conversion flow is disconnected to previous processes and next steps, leaving Sellers not knowing what they are doing and what to do next
Usability Study: Why Are They Dropping?
In order to understand:
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Why Sellers drop when using the current conversion experience
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Sellers' conversion behaviors (how often, and how many products each time)
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How Sellers think of the 2 redesign explorations (a product-level one page conversion experience and an improved session-level conversion workflow)
I created the study plan, built a few prototypes, and launched a UserTesting.com study.
Prototypes of Design A & B (InVision prototypes) shared in the usertesting.com study
And here are the key findings generated from the 15 testing sessions:
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Time and efforts is the key reason Sellers dropping their session
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Overwhelming navigation making it difficult for first time users
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Fragmented processes do not resonate with Sellers’ understanding of ”enrolling my products into FBA” process
Based on the findings, here are the opportunities and design strategies I identified:
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Reduce efforts, only collect information to unblock each listing from inbound
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Improve navigation to help Sellers stay on top of what needs to be done for each listing, and next steps
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Seamless transitions in and out of the workflow
The refined experience vision
Moving Towards The Simplified Conversion Experience: The Phased Plan
The current flow has been there for years without any major updates. Sellers have developed their own workarounds and even internal tutorials in their businesses. While participants in our study expressed interests in the simplified design, some are less excited about changes since they were already forced to get used to the existing one, and are less willing to invest in learning new processes.
To move towards a simplified conversion experience and test our assumptions gradually without affecting Sellers' day-to-day routines much, we created phased plans to test the product and UX assumptions bit by bit.
