Shopping.com (an eBay company)
I was recruited to help redesign Shopping.com, the Shopping.com Merchant Account Center and the Shopping.com Partner Account Center.
First question: Who is our target audience, and how do they actually shop online?
After some key research we were surprised to learn that some shoppers took upwards of 19 hours (!) to research and make a qualified decision on certain online purchases. We started by reviewing their behaviors to find out what was causing the delays and then attempted to streamline both the research and purchase processes.
Our mission was to help consumers make confident purchasing decisions when they didn't know exactly what to buy. We aimed to provide online consumers with simple and easy comparison features that take the stress out of online shopping, help inform the right purchasing decision and lead them straight to the products they're seeking, while saving time and money.
We spent a great deal of time designing, prototyping, building and testing ideas both with users in usability testing sessions, as well as A/B testing. Splitting a portion of our traffic off to test new theories fully before turning them live on the public to make sure we had the optimal interface designs.
One odd lesson learned was that we pre-qualified the leads too well and people were making the final decision to purchase on our site instead of the merchant sites. As a result we opted to change the amount of information and photos available on SDC in order to drive merchants more clicks and let them qualify the shopper and own the customer and the purchase.
This is what Shopping.com looked like when I arrived before redesign. The navigation to populate the Shopping.com Top 5 products was hidden. Many users never found it. As a result they often thought we only sold one type of item. In this case printers. We stayed true to the original color palette, and logo but gave Shopping.com, The Merchant Account Center and the Partner Center major aesthetic facelifts.
See current site: Shopping.com
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
