Home page for new sellers

Task

The key metric was time to market (TTM). In our product, that’s the time from a merchant’s sign-⁠up to their first sale.

Research showed that newcomers often got lost in the interface right after verification, so their store sat idle longer.

Goal: speed up the first sale with a personalized dashboard with tips

Process

I worked closely with 10+ adjacent marketplace teams.

My job was to gather requirements from different business units and turn them into a single journey that made sense to users.

• After talking to stakeholders, I separated out the real user pain points. Together with the product manager, we prioritized ruthlessly so as not to “drown” in the scope, as previous teams had
• Studied competitors to see how they handle information overload during onboarding
• Built a prototype and tested it with participants of varying experience. We needed to know whether the “tasks” overloaded newcomers and whether they gave a sense of progress

Solution

A “New seller home” block on the home page, where users land right after successful verification.

Tasks depend on the seller’s store type — FBO (fulfillment by operator), DBS (delivery by seller), C&C (click and collect) — and on how the user went through onboarding and which optional steps they completed there

• We kept only the actions that directly affect sales: building the assortment, logistics, joining promotions and setting up e-⁠document workflow (EDI)
• Tests showed that users engage far more when they see a direct benefit (for example, advertising bonuses for completing steps). But we couldn’t get this approved for the first iteration
• We dropped extra tips and hints that test participants found useless, keeping only the key actions for a successful start

Result

We delivered a fully validated, development-⁠ready solution. In the final usability test with 6 participants, the interface caused no difficulties and answered newcomers' key questions.

The project went into development and the team started building it, but didn’t finish because further development of the product was stopped 🫠