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.
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
Even though logic is right, the team pointed out two major problems:
• If the user's question is about something else, being asked “Is your question about shipping?” feels irrelevant and jarring.
• It's not scalable. As more use cases arose, we’d need to keep adding logic, which could get messy fast.
Based on my research, 81% of customers prefer to find answers themselves, and most leading e-commerce sites go this route. They 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 (buyers, sellers, and us) really need is a robust problem-solving channel.
• We can show dynamic FAQs based on buyers' order status
• Easy for other teams to adapt and improve
• Assign support tickets to the right team based on the topics
• Save time for buyers, sellers, and us
• 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.
Looking back, we didn’t reach out to buyers for any feedback. If I were to do it again, I would try to:
• Run usability tests on the prototype of the initial idea.
• Get user feedback post-launch to understand what’s working and where users still struggle.
