Wish Marketplace
This project offers a new seller experience for 500,000 merchants globally and 40,000 physical store owners. They can now have digital storefronts, connecting with 100 million consumers worldwide.
Overview
In 2020, 9 months prior to Wish's bell-ringing moment at Nasdaq, I had a special chance to lead the redesign of Wish marketplace. This web-based merchant dashboard empowers 500,000 Wish merchants worldwide to enhance their online business. Moreover, the redesign assisted 40,000 brick and mortar store owners across the U.S. and Europe in transitioning their local business online during the global pandemic. I am thrilled to share this significant design journey with you!
Research
The purpose of redesigning Marketplace is to connect prospective and existing Wish merchants with shoppers, and facilitate transactions worldwide. User base: 500K+ Wish merchants; 100M+ Monthly active Wish shoppers. Transaction volume: 150M+ Products listed for sale; around 1.8M Products sold per day. Apart from the active state of the marketplace, there exist underlying obstacles to expanding the merchant base and product listings available to shoppers:
Lack of Merchant Diversity
As of 2019, 93% of Wish's merchants are from China, 4% from the United States, and 3% from European countries. In January 2020, Wish faced a critical supply shortage. Initially, manufacturers in mainland China paused production lines due to city lockdowns. Subsequently, international shipping services such as air freight and ocean shipping were significantly reduced due to border protection policies. This led to a scarcity of Wish's primary supply of low-priced, imported goods. Hundreds of products went out of stock every day with no indication of when they would become available again.
A marketplace cannot exist without products. The team I worked with, the Marketplace & Logistics team, shifted the top business priority to acquire and grow new merchants in global markets, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and all European countries.
Integration-based ecosystem
The Wish marketplace operates and grows with minimal human interaction between merchants and the service. Most of Wish's merchants rely on business development representatives for guidance and utilize API integrations to list their products and fulfill orders. It typically takes new merchants around 3 months to complete the onboarding process and an additional 1-2 months to make their first sale. While this timeline is manageable for wholesale merchants who have other sources of business, it can be daunting for small and medium-sized businesses.
Not suitable for small businesses
During COVID-19 lockdowns, owners of small local businesses faced challenges due to reduced foot traffic to their physical stores. To stay connected with their customers, they needed a digital storefront immediately. However, many of them had little experience in running online stores to sell high-demand, locally-sourced products such as hand soap, Tylenol, and toilet paper (primarily consumer packaged goods). These small businesses are not as resilient as major market players, but they play a crucial role in maintaining the fabric of local communities. This presented an opportunity for Wish to support these local businesses during difficult times and give back to the community.
Opportunity
The research informed the foundational design principles for the new seller experience. These design principles served as the cornerstones for all stakeholder reviews and discussions, ensuring that the broad team is focused on what matters most for the new seller experience:
Ease of Use - Sellers highly value ease of use and will advocate for good experiences.
Quick Set-Up - Sellers want to be able to onboard and set up their store quickly, even without extensive technical knowledge.
Clear Navigation - Consistency in navigation is important across multiple selling platforms, not just within Wish's ecosystem.
Problem Statement:
I am a local business owner. I am trying to curate new products for my store and expand my customer base beyond my local area. However, opening an online store is challenging. This is because there is a lack of guidance to get started, no clear path to follow, and the information available is scattered and cluttered. These factors make me feel lost and frustrated...😕
How can we create a selling experience that is achievable, exciting, and accommodating to individuals with varying skills and knowledge levels?
Design solution
Feedback
By spearheading the redesign of the merchant onboarding experience, three types of feedback significantly influenced the design direction and practices.
1. Product feedback to narrow the disparity between the business model and the mental model of merchants.
The first image in this section is a great example of how merchants' profit generation differs from platforms' profit generation. Merchants often view product pricing as a profit lever and shipping charges as a cost. However, the selling platform includes shipping costs in the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), which affects revenue. This implies that for merchants to succeed on Wish, they need to start considering shipping prices as part of their profit margin, which varies based on the destination country. I led the team to introduce "Set up shipping" as an onboarding task by working closely with product partners who manage product listings and catalog domains. This provides a contextual entry during product listing to increase awareness and discoverability of shipping settings configuration.
2. Design feedback to evolve the design language and enhance product marketing.
Our team lacked marketing designers to create unique, on-brand visual assets for guided user flows. These assets are essential for making omnichannel communications, such as system emails and announcements, more digestible, allowing merchants to adapt at their own pace. I took the initiative to collaborate with the consumer team, which oversees the design of the Wish app. Together, we collected and audited visual elements for our team's use. I also created initial illustrations to enhance core user flows and brought on my first few reports (hired) through internships to expand the design language. Looking back, it was a team effort across multiple design departments to evolve a branded design language.
3. Live feedback from cross-functional partners for ideation.
As the redesign impacts all areas of the merchant experience, there were not enough product owners to support this initiative full-time. To overcome this limitation and generate product requirements, I facilitated various ideation workshops. Using a Miro board, teams from engineering, data, business development, and merchant communications participated in live ideation sessions to identify solutions for merchants.
Improvements
The improvements made weren't just about enhancing the new merchant experience. They were transformational. I was privileged to lead and contribute to this process. The first four screenshots depict the initial state of the experience. Following these, you'll see the design system I spent three years developing with the marketplace team. This system allowed us to completely redesign the experience from scratch. Additionally, I played a brief role in strategizing the design process for a small team of four. At that time, I incorrectly assumed that a design roadmap consisted only of stateful screens! My perspective has certainly evolved since then.
Testing
Due to the tight project timeline, our testing primarily involves internal critiques and unmoderated tests. In some instances, I used heatmaps to evaluate the redesign of the page hierarchy and identify areas of interest on relational elements.
Outcome
Sped up the sign-up process by 50%.
By removing the survey, the sign-up process now only consists of two steps, significantly reducing the average time from over an hour to about half an hour.
Smoothed security validation to further increase sign-up speed by 60%.
As a result of the redesigned password experience, the signup time has been reduced to just 10 minutes.
Ensured that 85% of new merchants complete store set-up within a day, which is a significant improvement compared to the previous timeframe of 3-4 months.
Since the introduction of this new experience, 85% of merchants who signed up on Wish successfully completed the onboarding process within the first two weeks. On average, it takes them 0.94 days to upload their first product, which is 40% faster than the previous seller experience. By deferring the validation task from the onboarding process, merchants can focus on critical tasks such as adding products, verifying their email address, enabling two-factor authentication, and setting up payments and shipping.
Improved information architecture and content design during the first 90 days of onboarding and influenced marketing practices.
The redesigned information architecture and web content have had a broader impact beyond the app experience. The new designs have given a fresh look and feel to all merchant marketing emails, and for the first time, introduced video tutorials along with FAQ articles.
Testimonials
“I hope you folks stay with Wish longer because you are good!”
- Merchant onboarded in 2020
Learnings
1. Solve problems together: This project was challenging. Completely transforming a marketplace from the ground up in 5 months required more than just creativity. I was fortunate to be part of a supportive team that took excellent care of each other. We brainstormed on a remote drawing board and paid attention to the finest details in our designs. Our project managers and engineering partners brought passion to every discussion, always striving to enhance the user experience. 2. Share, share, share: While it's common to overlook sharing opportunities in the process of perfecting designs, it's crucial in a rapid development cycle. Extra perspectives can help identify stress cases that may have been missed, stimulate discussions to broaden your viewpoint, and review work prior to release. Sharing ultimately strengthens designs.