what’s the deal?

LEADING DESIGN ON FOR DEALS ON AMAZON

As the lead designer for Amazon’s Deals team for over two years, I partnered with the Berlin-based product team to reimagine the Deals experience. After a period of backend migrations with no customer-facing updates, I was tasked with identifying customer pain points and developing a vision for the next 1-2 years. Though deals may seem straightforward, pricing and savings are essential to customers, making it a rewarding area to improve. Key projects included helping customers understand deals better, enhancing personalization, improving deal discovery, and creating excitement around savings.

On the surface, deals isn’t the sexiest product, but price and savings are a big deal to customers so I loved working in this space. I worked on a lot during these two years but some of my favorite work included:

  • Help customers better understand deals and savings through a dynamic badging framework

  • Make sure customers don’t miss out on great deals and prices

  • Improve the deals experience for customers through personalization, better browsing and discovery and generating more excitement around savings and developing a roadmap for the deals experience

ROLE
senior ux lead, ideator, researcher, collaborator

TEAM
Brian Thurston Bralczyk, design manager
Luke Newham, product owner
David Luc, product owner
Jason Wardwell, deals director

opportunity: deal displays confused customers

  1. 'List/MSRP price' & 'percent savings' help customers calculate how good a deal is. They are frustrated when this isn’t consistently displayed.

  2. There are many types of deals a seller can create. Standard deals, quantity based or time based “lightning deals”. This experience would confuse customers as it wasn’t clear when and when they would not see these labels. It further confused them on days like Prime Day and comparing every day deals to deals specific to the event.

  3. Deals also include a range of discounts on a single item or a seller can select multiple products and place them all on a deal. These were displayed with price ranges that were confusing to customers on what was the value of the deal and what items were discounted.  

solution: create a dynamic badging system

Looking at the main attributes across all types of deals I created a system that would display savings as the primary element. By highlighting the percentage off or savings amount, the main factor customers use to evaluate the value of a deal. The secondary element will provide supporting context of the deal such as price condition in order to receive the deal price, time remaining, inventory left or deal type. This info would dynamically change depending on the deal and the customer.

Exploring shapes and colors for experimentation.

Experimenting with the dynamic badge and how it would change from before it starts to ending. Calls to actions, countdown timers and messaging to customers change as the deal changes.

the results: more than just a badge

THE NUMBERS

+$119.5MM incremental annualized revenue world wide
+$16MM incremental annualized total revenue
+$111.2MM incremental annualized Deal revenue

KEY FEATURES

  • Automated discount messaging — the dynamic badge updated the generic deals badge to a discount badge. This helped customers compare deals and savings at a glance rather than having to search for information in the product titles. Because the primary information shown is the percentage off we created automated discount messaging where before these things were manually provided by sellers and would be inaccurate.

  • Creation of a consistent CX for all deals — standardized discount CX across all deal inheriting the same savings badge.

  • A single source of truth for deals badging information that can be leveraged sitewide — previously teams managed their own deals badging across search and category pages. With the new framework in place we built an API so that teams could add deals and their experience would automatically update to the current badge and be consistent with the rest of the site.

opportunity: customers missing out on lighting deals

After Prime Day 2020, we observed an issue that customers were not aware of the 15-minute window to check out after adding a lighting deal to their carts. There were 3,620 customer service contacts worldwide related to the issue and we suspected more knowing not all customers contact customer service.

solution: increase visibility of the deal timer

Creating a series of experiments to test more visibility of the lighting deal timer and sending customers reminders to checkout throughout the shopping journey on the deals page, on detail page and in customer’s carts.

the results:
small changes make big wins

The experiments we tested resulted in $167.0MM in annualized revenue. Our team was also nominated for Amazon’s Empty Desk award for addressing a common customer service contact.

This was project was a favorite of mine because the solutions seem obvious and show the importance of investing in small changes to improve the customer experience. It also made foundational improvements to the deals experience that improves some of our highest trafficked days that are driven by deals like Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber Monday.