Redesign twitter for eCommerce

Question

Twitter diversifying into ecommerce since it turned profitable due to revenue from ads. It could be loosely based on FB Marketplaces or Instagram enabling SMB.

Answer 1

I would ask a few clarifying questions:

Twitter eCommerce means a twitter store like facebook store there people would sell their products through a twitter account. The owner could make and edit their listing with high definition pictures and product description.

The goal of a twitter eCommerce: To expand its customer base by allowing the businesses to list their catalog and users to buy and use their data to give more personalized services and experience. In long run, they could also ask a cut from businesses on per transaction basis.

Is this design for web or app?

Since 80 percent twitter users are from Mobile. I would go for an app.

Approach: 

I would like to discuss about users and their personas then I would go through their interaction with the product i.e use cases. After that, I would prioritize use cases by offering alternative solutions and finally, I would evaluate these solutions tradeoff in terms of impact vs effort.

Users

• Small and medium scale businesses
• Twitter user between the age of 18-29 according to Twitter statistics 40 percent of users fall in this age group.

Based on the business goal to increase its user base I would prefer designing platform for twitter users. Businesses are also important but it won't impact much in an expansion of its customer base.

Use Cases

1. As a user, I would like to get a search option to put an item name
2. As a user, I should be able to navigate to product detailed page
3. As a user, I should be able to add a product in the cart
4. As a user, I should be able to put my address and confirm my order.
5. As a user, I should get an order confirmation.

Number 2,3,4 are important because I would be more interested in looking product details and order confirmation.

Solution

Answer 2

Clarifying questions

1. What type of eCommerce? What type of customer? Or I choose?

2. Any product surface? mobile, desktop, etc? Any specific geo?

3. Specific goal in mind? Or I choose?

4. Digital or physical good?

Assumptions: I choose all

Business

Mission: Give everyone in the world ability to share ideas and information instantly without barriers

Key company Metrics: DAU, ARPDAU

A note on business models: Twitter has a B2C / display ads business model that has some similarities / differences from eCommerce. A healthy amount of deliberation with execs would be wise.

eCommerce is a broker/marketplace. Two sided:

Seller and buyer. Business model is a chicken a egg problem. You want enough buyers to attract sellers. You want enough products for buyers to access (flywheel and inertia problem). Selecting a group with enough data and size is important.

Customers

We need to choose segment. Twitter has global audience and need to niche down for any new products. Building for everyone is destined for failure. Keep in mind we have two user groups: 1) sellers and 2) buyers

Will focus on buyer side. I’ll segment on lifestyle.

Users:

1. Travel (Guessing 5% DAU)

2. Health & fitness (5% DAU)

3. News junkie (20% DAU)

Estimating TAM for each will give us idea on opportunity and allow us to prioritize size relative to the flywheel/inertia problem above. Estimate news junkie is largest (Twitter began marketing itself as a news product few years back)

20% of 150M DAU is 30M potentially interested users. If we can convert 1 in 10 with our feature, that’s 3M users. If the average revenue per user is $10, that’s a $30M opportunity.

Choose: News junkie

Goal / metric

Sellers

# active sellers

# repeat buyers

% news products sold vs listed

# income

Buyers

# gross revenue

# active buyers (% DAU)

# repeat buyers

% conversion

Choose: # active buyer (since it’s new, can be indicative of product market fit). % DAU (segmented by news reader DAU would be even better)

Use cases for buyer side for news

- I want well thought-out content

- I want it timely

- I want it reputable (not false)

- I want it easy to read

- I want it easy to purchase

Choose: Long-form journalism product. We'll go after a digital marketplace (no physical goods) which can have some strategic benefits (less hit to user satisfaction around lost products, long shipment time, etc)

Narrow use cases down

- I want to know amazing authors

- I want to know background information

- I want to know they’re reputable

Choose: List sellers (assuming we can sign them up) offering long form journalism. The conversation could stay at a high level instead and go through all the large features needed for this but will continue to refine into a single feature for simplicity.

Narrow user cases down for listing of sellers

- I  want accurate info score

- I want a beautiful bio of the author

- I want info on their following (social proof)

We can summarize our OKR

OKR: Drive buyer adoption

Result 1: % DAU / % news reader DAU

Result 2: D7 retention (how many come back)

Result 3: Conversions

To summarize

Twitter’s mission is to spread info without barriers (DAU, ARPDAU)

Interest in opening ecommerce (seller buyer flywheel challenge)

Choosed news junkies with long form journalism (digital product)

Goal is to increase # of active buyers / % DAU

First feature is to focus on listing of sellers

Metrics: %DAU, D7 retention, conversions

Answer 3

Product vision: Connect the buyers and suppliers throughout the world with similar interest. 

There could be numerous ways for redesigning twitter for e-commerce. We can choose some of the following features depending on user requirement and platform-support:

User story: Similar to instagram

Advertisements: Advertisements in between  the content as regular news feed.

News feed: A scrollable bar for relevant items for sale.(Similar to facebook news feed)

Social proofing: 

• Promote users to share their purchase stories with hashtags (just after they made a purchase). 
• It will enable other users to trust twitter as a shopping platform. 
• And, show it as a small icon on the bottom-left of the page. 

 Status messages: This feature will be in the mobile app (majorly)

• Similar to whatsapp status messages/videos. 
• It will enable users to see what their friends (people they followed) are selling.
• It will also enable the suppliers to showcase their best items.

Some other important features could be:

• Suggesting the sellers the hashtags for items, 
• join images as videos to create a lasting impact on buyers, 
• showcasing the best-sellers (to give an idea of what the best products look like)
• Pre-booking festive sale page territory: The items would show on the top to each user on www.twitter.com/marketplace) as sliding banner images.

Comments

Hi praveen
I think your structure needs some work. Have you looked at the interview guide for how to answer a product design question? https://productmanagementexercises.com/how-to-answer-a-product-design-question

Answer 4

Clarifying questions:

What is the goal of the redesign? Let's says, the goal is to increase revenue. Twitter revenue could come from two sources

- ads

- rev share with business aka take a cut for every sale 

What is the problem with the current design? Let's say users are not buying the products. 

Do we need the redesign for the web app or mobile app? I would assume mobile app as the majority of the users are on mobile. 

Our goal is to redesign the twitter e-commerce mobile app to increase revenue via a revenue share model 

Users

- Business owners

- Consumes on the app

Report user needs

- As a business owner, I would want my product to be easily searchable and show on top of the search list so that I get more conversion

- As a business owner, I would like to target users who are interested in buying the products I am selling

- As a business owner, I want the payment transaction to be an easy one-step process

- As a user, I would like to compare the ratings, prices of the products I am looking for

- As a user, I want my PII information to be hidden from the business owner. 

- As a user, the payment transaction should be a one-click process

- As a user, I should be able to return the product if it is defective. 

There could be more scenarios, but let us target our user as Business owner  (The more people buy the products, the more the revenue share)  

Cut through prioritization

We will focus on use-case 2, re-design the way the campaigns are set up and provide better targeting capability. The better the targeting, the more probability for a user to buy the product. 

List solutions 

Solution	Impact to Business	Cost to Twitter	Complexity
Provide business owner market trend for the product they are selling. Market trend in terms of age group of people buying a similar product, demography, location etc and allow them to target the users based on the trend.	High	High	High: Twitter would have to do market study for every business owner and every product
Provide business owner the ability to target based on keyword search	High	Low	Low: Show products when the user is using 'keywords' in the search query
Provide business owner the ability to show their product ads on the feed using hashtag of the product	High	Low	The technology already exists
Provide business owner the ability to search for an influencer best suited for spreading their product/campaign	High	High	Medium: Twitter already has data on influencer, it just needs to create a tool which could cost with respect to engineers, hardware etc
Provide business owner the ability to retarget the users (people who have already bought a product, might need accessories or similar genre prodcuts)	High	Low	The technology already exists

Summarize

The revenue could be increased by allowing business owner to target the relevant users. This could be achieved by implementing 

2, 3 & 4 as MVP. 

Comments

Enjoyed reading this. Thanks!