Key challenges

FBA business growth led to increasingly complex tools.

  • Sellers needed enhanced reporting on customer returns, but existing tools lacked comprehensive insights.

  • Existing workflows were inefficient, requiring sellers to piece together data from multiple reports.

Optimizing Friction and Scale for Amazon Seller Central

Around 60% of Amazon sales come from third party sellers, and yet selling on Amazon is endlessly complex. Amazon FBA sellers use Seller Central to manage Inbounding shipments, inventory levels, customer returns and customer communication.Seller Central is the business hub that allows millions of sales to happen every day.

Designing for Amazon Seller Central is a massive UX challenge as our team was trying to turn an industrial-grade enterprise tool into an intuitive dashboard for millions of everyday small business owners.

Role

  • Led design for the returns experience, Shipment Management & Amazon Global selling, and other product listing UX.

  • Defined scope, evangelized the seller, and coordinated with global development teams.

  • Created frameworks, prototypes, and design principles.

  • Conducted usability testing and gathered seller feedback including Amazon FC Visits.

  • Partnered with product managers and researchers to identify seller needs.

  • Collaborated with two designers on inbound and in-stock tools.

Impact

  • Growing the Seller business means more selection for Amazon Customers. 

  • Decreasing rate of return for sellers unblocked Sellers onboarding to FBA.  

  • Design measured success through increase in HMD feedback score (Old UX vs. New).

Meaningful insights

As the FBA business expanded, supporting tools became overly complex. Sellers severely lacked comprehensive insights into customer returns, hindering their ability to make critical business decisions.

I used this opportunity to study user needs and redesign the tools. The goal was to replace complexity with speed, delivering actionable insights that empower sellers to make pivotal choices instantly.

Below is a Seller deep dive I conducted using data and tools available.

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existing experience

40 reports and growing

Our existing workflow presented a cascade of bottlenecks that demanded a thorough overhaul. Upon a customer initiating a return, FBA sellers encountered a lack of comprehensive insight via email and were compelled to sift through multiple reports, piecing together information manually.

Furthermore, a distinct call to action was absent, preventing them from preempting similar returns or gaining insight into the underlying triggers.

The vision

A centralized Suite

I envisioned a centralized suite of tools providing access to critical business analytics and task-oriented workflows.

  • Designed a new returns experience providing insights into return reasons, enabling sellers to make informed decisions and reduce return rates.

  • Enabled sellers to quickly identify bottom-performing products.

  • Implemented customizable tables with filters to display large datasets without overwhelming users.

  • Addressed terminology issues by providing tooltips and revising column titles.

User Research

“if we know why an item is returned, we will do whatever it takes to make it better. On our website, our return rate is 1%. On Amazon, it's 5%. We sell over $200k a month. That's $10k per month for Amazon for one seller. There is no reason Amazon returns should be 5 to 7 times our website returns. Our returns for MFN are even lower because we take the time to ask why an item is being returned what we can do to help. That level of detail for returns via FBA has to be provided.”

Amazon FBA Seller

“For the moment, the information we are getting is fairly basic and it doesn't enable us to do too much with it, so we are kind of guessing a lot of the time. If we had more detailed information we should make more decisions - we can go to supplier and give information about percentages of a product being turned back for particular reasons.”

Amazon FBA Seller

Design

Bottom performers

Rather than digging through monthly reports, Sellers are able to identify their bottom performing products at a glance, which would signal a deeper investigation into specific returns. 

Design

Table displays

A key challenge in designing column displays for sellers is that no two sellers will agree on which metrics are most important. As each seller manages their business differently, a framework that allowed for customization controls and filters enabled us to display a large set of data without overwhelming users with irrelevant information. 

3.8 8.1

Results

Significant improvement in seller feedback on "Manage your FBA Returns (from 3.8 to 8.1 rating).

Inventory suite became the highest-rated experience on Seller Central.

Empowered sellers with increased transparency and easier access to return information.

"I appreciate the increased transparency with FBA returns. Some of this information was previously unavailable to sellers. It's much easier here and to see the outcome of old returns "  - Amazon FBA Seller

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What I learned

Defining what’s viable

Balancing design progress with collaboration across global teams is crucial.

  • Defining guardrails around viable solutions is necessary, even when user feedback is prioritized.

  • Web-based tools can provide real-time data access and analysis that excels has limitations with.

  • Clear and consistent terminology is essential for user understanding.

Complexity of Enterprise UX: I am not the user.

Working in the Seller Space meant that every UX Challenge had 3 underlying dimensions: an Operational Process improvement challenge, A physical vs Virtual status challenge, and an information display or UI Challenge. This is quite a complex and yet fascinating space to work. On top of that, dealing with legacy tools where separate programs add features in silos and an evolving user base meant having to tackle complexity to arrive at an optimum UI solution. The risk is that there are many obstacles to making intuitive design changes that would benefit the Seller Base in very significant ways. 

Development Resource Constraints vs. User needs


Excel has its limitations
Excel has functionality in analyzing and transforming data that cannot be duplicated in a custom web tool. A dashboard provides simplicity of access at a glance, allowing users to quickly gain insight into key metrics without the complexity of having to download a file and perform analysis. Additionally, a dashboard provides information that may not easily fit into an excel spreadsheet, such as item images or trending customer comment themes. Dashboard stays up to date with new data in real time while eliminating the seller workflow of having to download and re-analyze new data from a new files. This is particularly important for sellers who have a significant number of returns but have not yet established a streamlined process around handling them. 


Email cannot replace a web-based tool
Emails don’t provide access to data in real time and require the seller to establish a manual workflow around receiving them, logging back into seller central and conducting an investigation into single return orders. For sellers who handle multiple return orders per day, the current emails received do not allow sellers to gain a full understanding of the return data. 

Identifying Quick wins for UX
Quick wins identified include 1) Making the terminology in reports clear & consistent by a) Provide tool-tip on hover states with clarifying explanations of business-centric terminology that may be unfamiliar to sellers. b) Revising terms in column titles in fulfillment reports such as unfulfillable, unsellable, sellable, customer-damaged, defective & damaged.