👀 OVERVIEW

While I was at Facebook Marketplace,
I worked with the Seller team to make it easier for sellers to promote their products to buyers.

For almost a year, we focused on building 3 new major features in this space: Promotions, Flash Sales, and Virtual Pop-up Shops. Plus, I designed a few North Stars peeking into the future of an expanded promotion program for sellers of all sizes!

📚 BACKGROUND

Facebook Marketplace is where people go
to find good deals.

We’re a little different from other shopping sites like Etsy, Nordstrom, or Sephora, where people are looking to be inspired to buy the next new and shiny thing. Instead, we’ve seen in research that Marketplace shoppers come to our platform looking for value, like a great deal on a preowned desk or a vintage dress.

On the other side of things, Marketplace sellers have pretty obvious wants: to sell more of their items, and to get more money.

Both of these groups are crucially important to us as a product team, of course—without either of them, we would have no Marketplace at all!

🤔 PROBLEM

Buyers want more value on Marketplace.
Sellers want to sell more.

Letting sellers put their items on sale solves both—
except Marketplace didn’t have that feature yet!

By letting sellers put their items on sale, we can kill two birds with one stone: give buyers even more deals to buy, and get sellers even more sales.

This may sound like an obvious tablestakes feature, but surprisingly, Marketplace didn’t have a way to do this in bulk. Sellers could only reduce the prices of their items one by one, and that’s no fun for anyone trying to make a sale with more than a dozen.

(Unsurprisingly, sales were a big feature requested in our user feedback groups on Facebook. We certainly still had a lot of catching up to do.)

😊😄 USERS

But not all sellers are made the same:
introducing your local small businesses
& the Big Brands.

While all sellers share a want of selling more, they can have very distinct individual needs & ways of operating. Our past research showed a few distinct archetypes: hobbyists, SMBs, and Big Brands.

Since the current way of putting items on sale (slashing the price of individual items) works for hobbyists, who have very few items, our focus here was on those SMBs and Big Brands.

Along with their very different ways of operation, these 2 groups also have very different approaches to sales—

Looking at all their distinct differences, we knew they needed distinct solutions, too. We decided to build 3 new features to fit their needs: Seller Promotions and Virtual Pop-up Shops for SMBs, and Flash Sales for the Big Brands.

(While we zeroed in on these 2 user groups, it’s worth mentioning that supporting sellers on Marketplace always means balancing the needs & wants of buyers, all sellers archetypes, and of course Marketplace as a business, all at the same.)

🏷️ SELLER PROMOTIONS

Seller Promotions was designed to be a
quick, easy, & versatile addition to the existing Marketplace seller toolkit.

Most of our SMBs are relatively new to business operations, and they’re exactly what our in-app Marketplace seller experience is designed for — making the process of selling as lightweight and easy breezy as possible, while being versatile enough to cater to the most common use cases.

And so while our team’s plan was to implement all types of common sales & promotions, in standard MVP fashion, we started with the most common of them all: flat discounts, ie. your classic 50% off or $15 off.

After close collaboration with our content designer, a few design crits and XFN reviews, and discussion with a designer from the Buyer team, we finalized a straightforward & simplistic flow for MVP, fully using existing components from the Facebook Design System.

Our MVP for Seller Promotions was simple.
Flat discounts, no bells and whistles.
(all that to come later.)

Entrypoint: Seller Hub

Seller Promotions lives in Seller Hub, home of all seller tools & info

Creation: Step 1

To start, sellers input the promotion’s basic, foundational info

Creation: Step 2

Then, they select listings they want the promotion to apply to, & that’s it!

Seller Promotions Home

Sellers can manage all their active, upcoming, and past promotions here

Promotion Details Page

Tapping a card shows all the promotion’s details at a glance, and it can be edited through the ellipsis

Seller Promotions on Web

Last but not least, web: user research shows our sellers with lots of items prefer using web

Of course, even simple flows aren’t without some fixes and edits along the way:

All Listings Toggle

Our eng ran into perf issues with the Select All button in Creation: Step 2. Since this is important for sellers, for MVP, we added it to the 1st step, though not ideal

Grid View Toggle

Original designs had a grid view to show more items at once, but it was too complex to implement for MVP

Integrity Improvements

Because sale items get promoted, some sellers would slash their prices to $0.01 and then list the real price in the description to game the system

🎉 Our test was a metric success (more details at the very end, under Metrics), so we shipped our MVP successfully, and we were onto the next few common sale types.

Next up, more promotion types—
Bulk Discounts & Free Shipping.

These were pretty simple additions to the existing flow, although Bulk Discounts had an added layer. Sellers often knew they wanted an item to have a bulk discount from the very beginning, while making the item’s listing, so we needed to add it into the listing creation flow too.

Promotion Creation

Here they are added to promotion creation along with our (temporary) implementation restrictions

Discounts in Composer

Unlike other promotions, bulk discounts are often evergreen and are thought of from a listing’s creation, so we added it to Marketplace’s Listing Composer

Product Page

This is what buyers see when they run into a flat discount & bulk discount in the wild!

& to infinity and beyond.
(translation: Our Holiday North Star)

Where to next? In the downtime I had during the holiday season, I worked on a North Star vision for the future of Seller Promotions, featuring even more promotion types and customization. The Figma was pretty vast, but here are some highlights:

Customization

Letting sellers customize how promotions show up on their storefronts on Facebook

Banner Selection

Marketplace already has a pre-made illustration library for various holidays. What if we offered these to sellers?

Seller Promotions Home

Showing a preview of the banners in the promotion cards

Commerce Profile

Showcasing promotions on the seller’s storefront. Sellers have been wanting to build their brand & profile more and more, and this is one step!

Audience Targeting

Letting sellers apply their promotions to followers, past buyers, or everyone on Marketplace

Product Page Upsell

Buyers can see exclusive promotion codes directly on the product page while they’re browsing

Expanding Bulk Discounts

Giving bulk discounts more granular control — now the discount can increase based on quantity

Free Gifts with Purchase

Adding a new promotion type, as seen at lots of department stores

🛍️ VIRTUAL POP-UP SHOPS

With Virtual Pop-up Shops, we could feature our sellers in an eye-catching, editorial way, and give buyers a reason to trust (and buy more).

When it comes to shopping on Marketplace, buyers usually don’t know who they’re buying from, whether it’s a hobbyist or SMB. It’s why they feel more confident shopping from trusted Big Brands, leading to more sales and our platform giving them more real estate and more spotlights.

Virtual Pop-up Shops let us shine the spotlight on our SMBs instead and support them by helping them gain more buyer trust. By highlighting qualified shops in a Marketplace-curated collection, we hoped buyers would trust the Facebook name and by extension, the featured shops.

For the specifics of this feature, we considered a few things:

Banner: Variant A

Both banner variants are meant to be very visual & eye-catching! This one features an h-scroll of items, in case one might interest a buyer

Banner: Variant B

Since one of our goals was to give sellers more brand presence on Marketplace, this variant features sellers & shops instead of products

Pop-up Shop Page

Going off Banner: Variant B, the pop-up shop page was designed to give featured sellers space to express themselves to buyers

⚡️ FLASH SALES

Flash Sales started out barebones,
but evolved into a storefront that landed
big wins for our Big Brands.

Flash Sales started out as a sudden top-down ask, so we only had a couple weeks to build it 0→1. Our MVP was a scrappy, bare bones proof of concept. The seller user flow didn’t even exist at this point—the Big Brands were interfacing directly with our product team to setup our first couple flash sale tests, and even calling our PM on his phone on weekends!

With no time to partner with our Visual Systems team for nicer illustrations or assets, I created a super simple storefront within the Buyer team’s guiding principles. After our first test sales proved to be a success, we polished our UI and working closely with our brand partners and the Buyer team to build a scalable framework that could easily work with any brand’s submitted assets.

MVP: Banner

Given the Buyer team’s existing banner guidelines and our need to feature brand assets, our MVP banner was very very simplistic

MVP: Flash Sales Landing

With no time to work closely with the Buyer team on a landing experience, this landing page used only existing patterns on Marketplace

MVP: Multi Brand Sale

We were working with a lot of brands in a short period of time, so we expanded the sale to support multiple brands’ items at once

v2: Banner

After the MVP’s success, we finally had time to polish the UI & get Buyer team approval! We used Instagram’s Shops as an inspiration

v2: Flash Sales Page

The refreshed landing page features the same design patterns as the new banner

v2: Deals Destination

Marketplace already has a page for sale items, called Deals Destination. We collaborated with that team to feature Flash Sales on their page

v2: Multi Brand Banner

Supporting sales across multiple brands in the redesigned banner

v2: Multi Brand Sales Page

As the feature scales, we’d need a place for buyers to browse all of the simultaneous sales in one place

v2: Multi Brand Landing

We planned to have sales with a singular theme that many brands could participate in, rather than multiple individual sales

On the seller side, we wanted to build a new self-service flow where Big Brands could submit proposals for flash sales for approval (instead of calling our PM on Saturday nights).

This new user flow was handled by a different designer on the Commerce Manager team. This was because Big Brands currently don’t use Facebook app for their seller tools and instead use Commerce Manager, a whole separate web-based suite of tools supported by a separate team. Our teams synced regularly through this process, but I can’t quite speak in detail about the design decisions made here!

Creating Flash Sales on Web
(designed by others, here for reference only)

The Commerce Manager team designed and built the seller’s side of the Flash Sale, & it was pretty neat!

🖥️ PROTOTYPES

Take a look at all the prototypes,
featuring the final designs I made:

(These are gifs of the Figma prototypes!)

Seller Promotions:
North Star

Virtual Pop-up Shops

Flash Sales: v2

📊️ METRICS

Each of our projects had major impact!
We passed most of our goals by a landslide.

While I can’t publicly talk about specific numbers, by the end, each of these projects went above & beyond the original goals our team had set in sales (our team’s topline metric) & seller transactions, plus all sorts of other wins:

👋️ NEXT STEPS

After our team’s major successes,
we’d opened the door to more opportunities.

One of the first wins was allocated resources to build a new Brand Outlet surface for Big Brands to sell their outlet items through Marketplace. Individually, I also wanted to look into the future and explore how we could continue helping our sellers succeed.

During my downtime, I created a quick presentation for our design director & other org design leaders, showcasing some quick concepts I’d whipped up for Seller Incentives work that would incentivize sellers to become higher quality sellers on our platform. I'm unable to share this work publicly, though!

I ended up leaving Marketplace & joining my current team, Facebook Play, but in the end, I’m really glad to have been a part of these efforts, and to have left the team on such a happy note. I'm excited to see what Marketplace will be up to next! 😊