Bringing Automatic Repricing to Amazon

Team: Design Students, Amazon Design Contact, PM Focus: UX Research

For my Capstone project at the Human Centered Design program at the University of Washington, I teamed with other students to research and design a useful enhancement to Amazon’s Seller Central platform. Along the way we were in regular contact with a design representative from Amazon who kept us in touch with an engineering and product team from Seller Central.

Due to the open ended nature of this project, it was heavily focused on user research.

Content Analysis

I wrote a script with my team to comb the Seller Central support forum for common and popular problems to develop an early shortlist of potential ideas that would benefit from design solutions. It gave us quantitative evidence of what the biggest problems were.

I also just sat down and read the threads themselves. I wanted to get a better understanding of users’ opinions on their biggest issues so I empathize better.

User Interviews

I performed a set of six user interviews with small business owners to get an expert’s eye on what it’s like to be a seller at Amazon. I composed a set of questions and followups to help us understand both their day to day lives, as well as their pain points selling on Amazon.

I built some of my questions around the issues we had discovered through the content analysis. Following up on these in an interview format gave me a more human insight into each issue.

Competitive Landscape

Now that we had a list of potential problem spaces, it was time to see how other companies were solving them. I worked with my team to explore competitors and analyze their approaches to offering sellers more.

We found that while Seller Central does have a lot of features, many were at “MVP” level and competitors were making money by offering deeper and more integrated solutions to one or two specific things like inventory management, pricing, product listing, etc.

A chart comparing Seller Central’s stock product features with those offered by other companies.

Free Automatic Repricing

We met with our stakeholders and made the decision to design an automatic repricing system for Amazon.

While Amazon had no automatic repricer in 2017, they did have a pricing team. We worked alongside that team’s PM to iterate on initial designs, refining per their feedback until landing on the mock-ups shown below. Iteration went quickly due to our familiarity with the problem space as a result of our research. It wasn’t long before we had our final mock-ups, marking the end of a successful project. We presented to their entire pricing team, which took the design assets to use and apply. Amazon now features a built-in automatic repricer designed in part through our work.

Portfolio 3 — A list of products with different pricing rules.

Portfolio 1 — A list of products with filters and navigation exposed.

History Table — A history of price changing events on a product.

history Graph — A price history chart on a product.

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