Shipping Transparency

Bringing shipping to to forefront of search and beyond allowing easy listing comparison and an increase in .

Compony: Trade Me

Release date: 2021 - 2022

Platforms: iOS, Android & Web

Role: Lead Product designer

Visit website

80%

of members found shipping information in search helpful or extremely helpful.
Increase

To listing page conversion to purchase conversion
85%

Pro seller adoption
Increase

Over all conversion

Background

Trade Me has been fighting our brand perception for the last decade. Through a serious of streams of work we enabled on strengthening our new goods perception. As I mention in the shopping cart project from 2014 we have been introducing new features and have ramped out our marketing to help change this perception. The impact of Covid throughout 2020 has accelerated the growth of e-commerce and this has caused a race to capture this new market among our competitors.

Myself and the other senior designers embarked on a design sprint to create a 5 year vision on how we can accelerate Trade Me’s transform into a goods marketplace and better understand the problems we wanted to tackle, these include:

Make finding a product easier by removing duplicated products
Meet customers expectations for e-commerce shipping from search to post purchase
Allow simpler communication between buyers and seller through an instant messaging.

With the help of many individuals and teams throughout marketplace we were able to secure a large investment over the next 5 years to provide outcomes to these problems.

This will allow us to realise out vision ”best in range delivered quick smart”. This allowed us to split this project into 3 parts, shipping transparency, product details pages and instant messaging for buyers and sellers. I was involved in all of these streams of work demonstrating my leadership skills leading to my promotion as a Lead Product Designer. Although I was involved in all three of these streams my main focus was in Shipping Transparency.

The Problem

Compete with the global industry titans by creating a best in class shipping experience.

To truly understand the customers problems we did analysed out competitors and ran customer interviews. From this we solidified our understanding that our users expectations of trade me our differs from a traditional e-commerce platform and/or the shipping on Trade Me wasn’t meeting our users expectations. The challenges ahead we’re going to be difficult on all fronts, creating a best in class shipping experience to help change our brand perception for our unique marketplace will thousands of sellers with varying shipping requirements from simple local shipping, drop shipping through to some unique options including helicopter delivered spa pools.

The solution

Bring forward crucial purchase decision information into search to make comparing and contrasting different listings quick & easy.

To give the solution the best chance of exposure to help change our brand perception we decided to start at the top level of the purchase funnel search and worked through the purchase funnel reducing friction at every step. To achieve this the engineers created a new shipping architecture to provide this new information and have an 85% professional seller adoption. This helps solve a long standing problem among many marketplaces of comparing similar items from different sellers. This addition gave our buyers better confidence leading to a higher purchase rate on the products/listings. Although the solution looks simple on the surface matching delivery options to million of delivery address took some serious thought and an iterative process.

The outcome

We had a positive impact to purchase conversion through creating a better experience for our members.

To understand, iterate and improve the impact of our changes at many levels we conducted A/B tests. The results of these many tests we have seen an increase in conversion from the product/listings across Trade Me Marketplace and recently a increase in purchase conversion (sessions to purchase rate). To understand how our members think about these changes we also ran a survey which came back very positive. With close to 80% of members that noticed the changes found it helpful or extremely helpful. This is the kind of results I like to see, good commercial impact while creating a better experience for our members.

Accelerating my leadership growth

I saw an opportunity with the projects many moving parts and decided to provide leadership across the many teams and designers. This helped align the teams to help create the successful solution you see today.

I was involved in the early planning stages of the solution form a Design and technical prospective to enable us to deliver the best possible experience. The success of this project was an amalgamation of several moving parts that needed leadership to evangelize the vision and direct the teams to achieve it. This involved regular comms to ensure the cogs meshed together to provide the best experience for both buyers and sellers. Based on my previous experience working with multiple designer across the original shopping cart project in 2014 and book a courier in 2015 which involved the same features across multiple platforms. This was a similar problem but with the additional of complex sellers support with a new shipping architecture.