LiveAuctioneers is an online auction marketplace. For sellers who used our shipping service, we promised to take care of everything to save sellers' time.
• Sellers often received shipping-related questions, which they couldn’t answer, so they had to redirect buyers to contact LiveAuctioneers.
• Buyers who needed help felt frustrated and confused.
Buyers don't know who handles shipping — but we’ve been hesitant to clarify this, as too much information could create friction instead of adding value.
Meanwhile, it's only one click away to message the seller, but contacting LiveAuctioneers requires multiple steps. We’ve intentionally kept it that way, since most questions are about the items—something only sellers can answer.
We couldn’t filter which messages were shipping-related, nor could we track where buyers were reaching out from.
Sellers told us that buyers mostly ask about order status or how to pay for shipping. That’s why starting from the Won Items page made the most sense.
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The simplest solution would be to ask buyers whether their question is about shipping whenever they reach out:
• If yes, route it to the LiveAuctioneers team
• If not, send it to the auction house
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Based on my research*, most sites show a list of FAQs before allowing users to send messages. I realized my initial idea can only fix a small problem, but what we really need is a robust problem-solving channel.
*According to Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers prefer to find answers themselves, and interactions with service reps are four times more likely to lead to customer disloyalty than loyalty.
Even though this idea will take longer to build, it has many advantages:
• Save time for buyers, sellers, and us
• Assign questions to the right person when needed
• Dynamic FAQs based on buyers' order status
• Easy for other teams to adapt and improve
• I planned feature structure with the PM
• I collected FAQs from other teams and draft copies
• I worked with the design system team to build the component
• I ran AB tests with engineers
We also observed a 2% uplift in the payment rate.
We will investigate other areas where buyers can message sellers and check the traffic, and decide if we should test Get Help flow there as well
Focus on what users want to achieve instead of the action itself.