Shopping.com (an eBay company): Merchant Account Center
See site: SDC Merchant Account Center
I was hired in August 2004 to re-design the Shopping.com Merchant Account Center. It was very similar to the LookSmart Advertiser Center which I designed the year before at Looksmart.com, but instead of site listings, this was products.
I did a heuristic evaluation of the 5 (near impossible) step merchant sign up process and found that only 1 out of 400 merchants was making it through the merchant on boarding process. The rest needed help from the Merchant Account Team to onboard, create their "product feeds" (a user stumping name for an excel spreadsheet) and help to set up their campaigns. I refined and simplified the sign up and on boarding process and quadrupled the number of existing merchants to over 8000+ within a few short months. Seven years later the sign up process and most of the Merchant Account Center remain completely unchanged design wise.
The purpose of the Merchant Account Center was to help retailers such as: Amazon, eBay, Nike, Apple, Macy's, and thousands more submit their product listings, manage bids, budgets, and track their customer leads thus acquiring new customers and increase online sales. Their products were advertised through highly targeted ad placements across the Shopping.com network of premium publishers (CNET, Bing, The Find and eBay) reaching over 200 Million customers monthly. Shopping.com operates in five global markets including the: US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia enabling merchants a truly global reach.
Shopping.com was purchased by eBay for $620 million June 2005 and is still a top product review and prices comparison service owned by eBay. It operates websites in USA, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia.
Five years later it is still one of eBay's top web properties
