LiveAuctioneers is an online auction marketplace, and we provide end-to-end shipping service. Some sellers choose to ship orders with third-party carriers like UPS. But the experience is not good: Sellers can't provide shipping quotes upfront, buyers can't track orders on LiveAuctioneers.
Our shipping service can provide shipping costs upfront, and we earn revenue through markup. Therefore, we want to build a solution for those sellers and transition them to our platform smoothly, so both buyers and sellers can have a better shipping experience.
The design process was not linear. I went through several rounds of iterations based on the feedback from users, engineers, account managers, and stakeholders.
By talking to sellers, I was able to map out their workflow clearly:
• When and how do they pack?
Sellers only start packing after receiving payments. Most items are not pre-packed.
• Do they charge a handling fee? If yes, how?
Most of them do. Some charge on a case-by-case basis, and some use a fixed amount.
• Do they need to make changes?
They often need to adjust the box size or number of boxes.
We had almost everything needed to ship these sellers’ orders: their location, catalogs, and order data. The only thing missing was the ability to generate shipping labels.
Sellers may operate differently, but I noticed they all tried to achieve the same goals:
• Fewer clicks, fewer files
• Faster order searching
• Quicker turnaround times
• Reduced buyer inquiries
1. Make it work: Transition the sellers to ship with our service seamlessly.
2. Make it better: Improve the feature to empower sellers to move faster
Why? We wanted to achieve our primary goal first, which is to get those sellers to use our service. But to make them stay, our product must improve their overall process.
We agreed to build an MVP that has just enough to fit into the seller's workflow. We skipped the things sellers don't need, such as accurate shipping quotes or email notifications.
Built with
The first few sellers who tried the MVP said everything worked great. We also saw +11% bidders, +16% visits, +27% bids per item, and +19% bids per bidder in those sellers' auctions.
Based on the research, we know there are things we can to to help sellers achieve their goals:
The current dashboard is outdated and hard to read. And most importantly, almost impossible to build new things on top of it.
Current shipping dashboard
(Click to enlarge)
The MVP only allows sellers to print shipping labels one by one. But based on the research, we believe allowing sellers to print labels as soon as they're available will significantly improve efficiency.
We have learned that many sellers operate auctions across multiple marketplaces. We believe centralizing orders in one place would save them a lot of time and effort.
• Interview sellers to learn about their experience with this solution.
• Clean up prototype, and test it with sellers for feedback.
