What improvements would you make to enhance the payout experience for Amazon sellers?

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What improvements would you make to enhance the payout experience for Amazon sellers?

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Ujjwald · Answer 1 · 2024-12-09T16:32:38+0000

Step 1 - Describe the product

I would first like to clarify my understanding of the product to ensure we are on the same page. Amazon has a lot of products but here, I am going to assume we are talking about the marketplace for buyers and sellers where buyers can place orders on amazon.com and sellers with fulfill those orders. Are we good so far?

Interviewer - Yes. Go on.

The seller app at a high level allows for its users to do the following.

List their products in the app
View the orders placed for their products on the app
View the various returns that they received from the app
Check the dashboard to see their financial performance vis a vis a previous time period.

By the payout experience, I assume you want to improve how the sellers feel when they receive their payout.

Does that sound right?

Interviewer - Yes

Step 2 - Clarify the scope of the question

I want to dig a little deeper into what you meant by "enhance". Is there any specific part of the experience you want me to focus on? Is there any specific business goal that we have, like maybe reduce the number of complaints after a payout or something of that sort?

Interviewer - The only goal of interest here is to improve the payout experience for the sellers.

Step 3 - Choose a goal

The Amazon Seller App and experience is now a very mature experience so I would choose seller churn as the primary business goal. Next, I would like to come up with some user groups and their pain points to see what we can add to the payout experience so that churn reduces.

Step 4 - List the user groups

If I have to categorize sellers, I would categorize them into 2 categories, the newly onboarded sellers and the more mature sellers who have been there for a while. I will try to go a little deeper into the new sellers because for the sellers who have been here for a while, they know the tricks of the trade. The new sellers may get frustrated earlier and hence quit. I assume that new sellers do churn more than the older sellers, but do correct me if I am wrong there as you would have that data available.

Interviewer - We can't say for sure but go ahead with the assumption.

Step 5 - List and prioritize the pain points

Give me a minute while I think about the pain points

Journey	Pain Point	Priority
List a product	Doesn't know how to write a good description of the product that can sell well.	High (This could be an indicator of how the sale will go)
	Don't know what kind of pictures and videos get the orders	Medium (Most phones these days shoot good photos so this is a medium issue)
Make Sales	Don't receive any orders after placing the product for sale	High(This will be a issue and will lead to a lot of seller churn)
Sends goods	NA	NA
Received returns	Not sure why the product was returned	High (Another issue that bothers sellers is that they get penalized for returns which may or may not be their fault)
	Worried about the additional cost of the return as they will still be charged by Amazon	Low (They can reach out to Amazon support if required)
Ask for feedback from customer	Customer doesn't give feedback despite requests	Low(Doesn't really impact customer payout experience and by extension churn)
Receives Payout after deductions	Not happy with the payout and have to talk to the Amazon team	NA

From the above, we can prioritize the below 2 pain points.

Doesn't know how to write a good product description
Not sure why the product was returned.

Step 6 - List and prioritize solutions

Pain Point	Solution	Solution Impact to user	Impact to goal	Engineering Impact
Doesn't know how to write a good product description	Based on the product, automatically generate a description stating that sellers with similar descriptions were in the top quartile of sellers in this category.	High - This will be helpful to the user to give them a nice draft ready for review and will improve the initial experience and also give them an idea about how to go about writing the description	High - This will help in reducing churn and improving the	Medium - This should not be too difficult, especially with Amazon's investment in Anthropic
	The system can rate the description provided by the seller and give them feedback, especially with things like the tone of the description and recommending some key words that would help them get more potential buyers to the page	High - This will be helpful to the new sellers and will help them draft better description which will lead to better paydays	High - This will help in reducing churn if the description lead to better sales	Medium - This should not be too difficult, especially with Amazon's investment in Anthropic
Not sure why the product was returned.	Have a probability calculator based on things like customer history, pincode history to check what is the probability of return and inform that to the seller	High - This will help the seller calibrate effectively	High - This will attempt to pre-emptively set the expectations with the seller.	Medium
	Offer the option to the seller to maintain that closer to the point of return so that if someone else purchases the item it can be shipped from the point of return to the new destination rather than make its way all the way back to the seller and then get shipped. This works best when it is not a damaged product.	Medium - This will help the seller in some way but it still qualifies as a return and this will be a more reactive approch	Medium - It still qualifies as a return though so the core issue remains	Medium
	Have some kind of remedial measures for the seller in the event that it is not a damaged product	High - Remedial measures like maybe giving credits or giving a fee for the return would help from a customer churn perspective	Medium - Won't scale very well and may also need to negative consequences	Medium

From the above, I would like to look at these 2 solutions.

Based on the product, automatically generate a description stating that sellers with similar descriptions were in the top quartile of sellers in this category.
The system can rate the description provided by the seller and give them feedback, especially with things like the tone of the description and recommending some key words that would help them get more potential buyers to the page

These will address the issues of payout expectations which will lead to a lower seller churn which will help Amazon in the long run.