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Amazon Seller Experience
2022
Empowering Sellers, one sale at a time
Background
The Amazon Selling Partner User Experience (SPUX) team owns the seller experience for core third party selling programs across the globe. We envision a world where every Selling Partner (SP), regardless of their size, business maturity, sophistication level, or ability, is able to achieve their business outcomes. Their Selling Partner Experience (SX) follows an intuitive structure where every piece is connected in a cohesive end-to-end experience. The SX is personalized to their needs and behaviors, built on a consistent foundation. Beyond providing business value, the SX is personable, engaging, and empowering.
Background
My role
I joined the team in 2020 to take a lead in reimagine the product compliance selling experience. Seller Product Compliance requires maintaining the attributes, labeling, and documentation needed prior to and after product distribution within a country and which demonstrate adherence to the government’s regulatory standards. This translates to ongoing requirements in product (safety), trade (security/fiscal), and tax/VAT (fiscal) categories, which are used to plan, sell, and continue to sell in each country.
UX Framework
User Interviews
UX Workshop Facilitation
Stakeholder Engagement
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Agile / Iterative Design
Competitor Analysis
Design Critique
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Problem Statement
"The fact that I never know from one day to the next what products Amazon is going to suddenly decide need pages of documentation is stressful and exhausting"
Sellers are frustrated with our compliance policies given the reactive nature of our experience (35% of SPs). The current new product listing process is to submit all or nothing, which for compliance does not work since Sellers need to provide partial information and see requirements in advance. The 28 blank generic compliance attributes they see for new products causes confusion. They then must use our help page taxonomy to determine what attributes and documents are needed, which we request in a separate (disconnected) application form up to 72 hours after listing submission. If the SP is missing requirements, their listing(s) are taken down until they can complete the requirement (often taking 30-60 days to complete, depending upon requirement), leading to lost sales.
"Actual support if an issue has been ongoing. We are being told to fix it ourselves, but we have been trying to do so for so long now, I would wish somebody at Amazon would step in to help."
Sellers are missing services or support to help address problems and work with Amazon on a proactive basis (17% of SPs). Our support teams who are working to triage missing documents or attributes with standardized blurbs do not provide requisite guidance in the eyes of our Sellers. Sellers are instead frustrated that they cannot talk to someone or gain directed support in real-time, and are asking why we didn’t try to help them in advance (they are not experts in compliance). They need handholding and additional services to get products ready to sell, to keep selling them, and to grow their sales. Besides upstream support and services, they need downstream services to manage ongoing communication and requirements with regulators (e.g., recalls as a service).
"Have one portal dedicated only to compliance issues with a support team dedicated solely to compliance that understands the issues (different by category) and can give adequate guidance."
Sellers are frustrated by the multitude of locations needed to manage a single compliance outcome (19% of SPs). Compliance for Sellers is currently a portion of eight different dashboards, and five different dashboards for Vendors. None of these current tools provide the context or content to understand what is needed or how to complete. Based upon feedback (SPSAT/Vibes, forums, surveys), Sellers instead prefer to manage compliance as a single to-do list or outcome across each of their various compliance “grain” objects (i.e., accounts, brands, product types, products, offers, manufacturers). There is no single place today that pulls this together, while still leveraging capabilities from other teams (i.e., listings). Sellers also state they would like us to extend rights to their trading partners (manufacturers, brands) to bring them into the process and allow them to provide the information (e.g., through mobile app).
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What we heard during User Interviews…
Actual support if an issue has been going on for over 3 months. We are being told to fix it ourselves, but we have been trying to do so for so long now, I would wish somebody at Amazon would step in to help. (UK Vendor, DG)
Just like we know when something is restricted, it would be nice to know which products are going to require Compliance documents prior to sending to Amazon warehouse. Would save us and Amazon a lot of time and money! (US Seller, PA)
Consistency is poor. I am manufacturer and Brand owner with only have 5 products, yet I have the same suppression issues again and again. I have to repeatedly ask for help to do the same thing over and over. All of my products have received full authority and are fully compliant but you suppress them regularly by mistake. This is very costly to my business. (UK Seller, DG)
It is almost impossible to get anyone to understand the issues. I run my business myself and often have to give up on even dealing with any problem with Amazon. (US Seller, PA)
Create a product assurance team with representatives who will respond to compliance communications, create a method to communicate directly with the compliance team, create a better format to download compliance requests in each of the categories. There is no way to download the requests, and this makes it extremely difficult to navigate through 1,000's of items. Provide better support when "rejecting" submissions, canned email responses and "internal" cases are not effective and even worse when they do not read responses provided. (US Vendor, PA)
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North Star Vision
We will proactively support SP compliance through education, engagement and enablement. We will improve ease of use and provide the right information at each step in the product compliance process. Our mission is to improve the SP journey through pre-listing (regulatory and policy education), listing (upfront compliance submission), lifecycle compliance (existing products, new regulations, or streamlined investigations), and compliance support and services. The cornerstone of the vision is a new and evolving single experience, termed Manage Your Compliance (MYC), that will be leveraged across all regulatory compliance types and that will give SPs the tools they need across our organizational lines (product safety, tax, Dangerous Goods (DG), regulatory attributes, cross-border, environmental schemes, etc.). We have also built Compliance Knowledge Portal (Compliance Reference) to educate SPs on compliance requirements pre-listing and Lab Central to support the acquisition of lab services needed to complete product compliance requirements.
Seller Experience
Results
I contributed to the S-team goal to improve tools ease of use score for product compliance, and SVP Goal to increase SP documentation request first response approval rate by supporting the pilot launch of the MYC experience in Seller Central for product compliance use cases across 11 stores (on track to support 19 by EOY). The MYC launch drove 532K unique sellers have made 5.5M compliance submissions within the MYC workflow (from April to August, 2022). Additionally, MYC is driving an increase of 19% (QoQ) in our bi-annual SPX ratings survey, and an increase in our FTAR goal (33.3% in Q1 [Pre-Dial Up] vs 46.8% YTD [10.2% above plan]).
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