objective.
Increase gross merchandise value for Marketplace products: Raise demand penetration and increase conversion.

role. 
Product designer

team. 
Marketplace, 
Digital Experience

Build and maintain the foundations required to offer a single-stop shopping experience, where customers can purchase from Marketplace sellers at the same elevated experience as the Bay owned products.

1.

Free Shipping
—The Bay Marketplace 

OVERVIEW

Free shipping has a significant influence in the purchase journey for online shoppers. It’s often what dictates whether customers make a purchase or abandon their cart. By displaying shipping benefits across The Bay, the customer will face a smoother and easier purchase experience. They won’t feel blindsided by hidden fees and are less likely to back out at the last moment.




OPPORTUNITIES

Product–detail page
The product page is the key area where users decide to purchase a product and move the item to the shopping cart. Maintaining a steady cost from product page to checkout increases a customer's likelihood on following through with the purchase. It also helps reassure customers they won't run into unexpected charges during checkout.

• Unlike The Bay owned items, Marketplace items have their own shipping and returns policies. Each marketplace seller sets their own free shipping conditions based on minimum order value and postal code.
  
  
• By having dynamic messaging, The Bay will be able to display all marketplace shipping offers based on each sellers’ conditions. By connecting with users’ postal code data, we can provide a personalized message according to each shipping zone and the minimum amount needed to qualify for free shipping.
  

OPPORTUNITIES

Shopping bag
Approximately 48% of customers will add extra items to their carts just to qualify for free shipping. From a business perspective, this translates into higher average order value and lower shipping costs. For marketplace sellers, the more items they can ship together, the lower their cost ratio is.

By providing promotions such as minimum-spend free shipping upfront in the check out process, we can make users aware of existing promotions and reduce cart abandonment.

• Surfacing the seller’s bag eligibility for free shipping should be clear and consistent across different scenarios. For marketplace, we have identified the following: Qualified for free shipping, dollar amount remaining to qualify for free shipping and free shipping not offered by seller. The Free Shipping notification should be dynamically updated based on a user’s current context.
  
  
• For delta scenarios, the experience should be simple and easy for customers to understand the rules to qualify for free shipping. As part of this release, we surfaced the dollar amount needed to qualify for free shipping and a link to the seller’s product array page.

MEASURABLE IMPACT & OUTCOME

The free shipping in cart feature was delivered on March 9, 2023 and the engineering team worked on small fixes post release.

After the release and compared to previous month, there was a considerable increase on marketplace demand from $5.1M to $8M. This also resulted in the increase of the average order value from $142 in February to $156 in March and units per transaction from 1.59 to 1.64.

Within a month timeframe, the website heat map highlighted the feature as the second most clickeable element in shopping bag. It gave us a visual overview of how users interacted with the notification message and their interest on purchasing more items to qualify for free shipping.

FUTURE PHASE

Shopping bag V1.2
The current experience makes customers leave the cart journey in order to add items from the same seller to reach the threshold needed to qualify for free shipping. It removes customers away from the funnel, carrying away customer’s attention and stagnating conversion.

– How might we provide product recommendations in cart that will help customers qualify for free shipping?

• Prioritazing user’s interaction on add items rather than directing users to the seller’s product array page. The add items feature will now display a selection of products close in value to the remaining dollar amount needed to qualify for free shipping.
  
  
• Enabling add item to bag functionality in shopping bag for items with no variables, and allowing users to make a selections for items with more than 1 variable e.g. Add to cart and Select options.
  

USABILITY TESTING 

As part of the design process and in partnership with the Research team, we ran an unmoderated testing via Maze with 12 participants.

Participants were presented with the prototype and told to: “Try to reach free shipping for Adidas. Task is complete when an item is added to cart and the orders reaches free shipping. Add the Trio pants (with the default selections) to your bag. Please take in the experience and the features as you add to bag.”

Almost 75% of users found this capability useful as part of their purchase journey:

• Helpful gesture to indicate clearly that one has not reached free shipping for a seller and to provide actionable help for that (CTAs are clear all the way through)
  
  
• It’s a really easy, quick way to add items from a seller and saves one from searching for more items.

• Customers are expecting the “Sold by Seller” CTA to direct them to a product array instead of seller’s policy page.
  

2.

Seller page
—The Bay Marketplace 

OVERVIEW

Marketplace inventory is praised for being unique, better than in-store, and offering a wide selection of items; however customers are not aware that they are purchasing from a Marketplace seller at every step of the journey, which causes them to feel misled or confused when discovering these items. Low awareness and limited knowledge about Marketplace has led customers to make their own assumptions on their shopping experience.




OPPORTUNITIES

Marketplace sellers
The current experience is not consistent across all sellers as it requires some code experience to set up a well structured page. Then, It becomes an opportunity to provide a cohesive experience in which sellers can engage existing customers, popularize seller’s brand/categories to newer audiences and focus on volume sales.

Customers
The Bay customers find that this page lacks visual interest and do not prioritize relevant information such as shipping and return policy. This page has the potential to become an important destination in the customer journey to learn about marketplace policies and products, and to create a sense of trust and confidence in the shopping experience.
.
Business
Set a common ground to build a good relationship between buyer and seller that can potentially translate into increasing conversion. Seller page is one of our first attempts to house the information or features needed to boost confidence in the MP journey.

RESEARCH

After running a competitive analysis on seller pages across different marketplaces sites, I identified a set of patterns in content architecture and navigation. As part of the design process, I run a qualitative research to understand user’s expectations and presented two different design approaches “Informative” and “Branded” page.

Features such as star rating, reviews, and background information help build credibility with the store. There are opportunities in displaying a catalog of items, however this might not have the same importance as shipping information.

“I have better expectation and trust on these sellers who actually take time to showcase their products. I also appreciate seeing a catalogue, although this isn’t as important to me”

  

DESIGN APPROACH

Empower Marketplace sellers by giving a level of control to tailor their page according to their marketing and business needs. 

—How might we help sellers provide a trustworthy shopping experience so that customers feel confident purchasing Marketplace products?



RISKS AND CONSTRAINS

• This page has the potential to drive revenue but the impact will be low since the discoverability of this page is only through two entry points: hyperlinks in Product page and cart.
  
  
• The template will depend entirely on seller’s input meaning that the result will vary based on quality and effectiveness of their content/assets and how each seller decides to adopt this page to reach their business goals.
  
  
• For existing users, Marketplace should consider a roll-out period for sellers to fully adapt/utilize/update the templates.