Amazon Automate Pricing
Month Duration
Year:
2017
Team:
Design Students, Amazon Design Contact, PM
Focus:
UX Research
What’s Been Done
For my Capstone project in the Human Centered Design program at the University of Washington, I worked with a team of students to work on an exploratory design project for Amazon’s Seller Central platform. Our project had a direct point of contact at Amazon, who we worked closely with, sharing designs and ideas. We also shared with various project managers and developers from the company.
The project was heavily focused on research, with its eight month period split evenly between research and design efforts.
Content Analysis
Using Amazon’s seller support forums as a dataset, we wrote scripts to identify which topics came up most often. We also collected and grouped threads that had a large number of replies, as this was generally an indication of community agreement with a particular issue. This allowed us to develop an early shortlist of potential ideas that would benefit from design solutions. It gave us numerical evidence of which issues were being discussed most often.
I also just sat down and read the threads themselves. I wanted to get a better understanding of users’ opinions on their biggest issues, since my job as a designer is to be a voice for those people.
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 worked with my team to compose a set of questions to help us understand both their day to day lives, as well as their pain points selling on Amazon. I also worked on sets of followup questions to help drill down into topics that the interviewees seemed interested in.
I built some of my questions around the pain points we had discovered through the content analysis. Following up on these in an interview format gave me a chance to greatly develop my understanding of these problems.
Competitive Landscape
Before we began trying to address the pain points uncovered by our previous studies, we wanted to see how other companies were trying to solve these problems. Each of us combed the internet for competitors to compare their products to features offered by default in Seller Central. This gave us a clearer picture of what the seller platform does, and what the paid alternatives do better.
This analysis was so effective that Amazon representatives briefly considered not letting us share it, but we were eventually granted permission.
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. Studying what these companies offered and comparing them to what our users were telling us they needed most gave us everything we needed to know to decide what problem we should solve. When we brought this information to product owners at Amazon, we were able to work together and make the decision to focus our efforts on pricing.
A chart comparing Seller Central’s stock product features with those offered by other companies.
Free Automatic Repricing
If you want to put a product up for sale for a specific price, it’s easy to do that. Just type it in. If you want that price to change automatically based on market forces like demand and competition though, things get more tricky. The user needs to be able to set pricing algorithms to manage each item that they’re selling. These “rules” may be fairly simple changes, or there could be several that each interact with one another.
While Amazon had no automatic repricer in 2017, they did have a team working on it. We were able to work with that team’s project manager to iterate on initial designs, refining per their feedback until landing on the mockups shown below. Our many research efforts made it easy to know at that point what the design should look like, and how it could provide the most value possible to its users. After a few iterations with their team, we had our final mockups, marking the end of a successful project. We presented to their entire repricing team, which took the design assets to use and apply.
