Improving customer retention for a leading e-commerce platform

Challenge

How can a global e-commerce platform improve the retention of Indian sellers?

Outcome

Identified goals, challenges and environment of Indian e-commerce sellers
Created user journey map to drive better results
Discovered drivers of sellers’ confidence
Design recommendations for the on-boarding and dashboard UX to improve retention of Indian sellers

Brief

The client is a leading global e-commerce platform with a significant number of sellers from India. The client’s team noticed that the most common challenges with their platform were “setting up their shopping portal” and “marketing of their shopping portal”.

The project goal was to improve the retention of Indian sellers’ on the platform by helping them overcome these abovementioned challenges.

Approach

Ethnity conducted remote video interviews with Indian e-commerce sellers. These participants were from different parts of India and were doing online business in various product categories. The e-commerce sellers were asked questions about their challenges while setting up their shopping portals and marketing their shopping portals.

We discovered the drivers of the seller’s confidence in their businesses and e-commerce portals.

This approach helped us understand the behaviour of the e-commerce sellers beyond their usage of platforms, and gave us a holistic picture of their goals and motivations for their e-commerce businesses.

Key facts:

Generative user research: User needs, challenges, environment
Location: Remote video Interviews with participants across the country
Duration of the Project: 3 weeks

Ethnity provided design recommendations based on the user research

Result

Identified goals, challenges and environment of Indian e-commerce sellers
- The study enabled the client to understand the goals and challenges of Indian e-commerce sellers related to their businesses.
- This helped the client understand their perspective about e-commerce platforms and their expectations from a platform.
Created user journey maps to drive better results
- The user journey maps were created based on the user touchpoints with the platform gave the client much-needed context.
- These journey maps helped in empathising with the users and understanding their needs and challenges.
Discovered drivers of sellers’ confidence
- Discovered the drivers of seller’s confidence in their own business and e-commerce platforms.
- These confidence drivers laid the path when designing for better UX.
Design recommendations for the on-boarding and dashboard UX to improve retention of Indian sellers
- We delivered design recommendations based on the user insights, to optimise user experience at specific touchpoints.
- Our recommendations helped address the user needs & challenges that were affecting retention on the platform.