Giveaway
Amazon giveaways help sellers get more reviews, engage with their customers and create a marketing buzz.
In turn, consumers can get free products just by entering to win.
Amazon Giveaway
Amazon Giveaway is a service that helps Influencers, Authors, Sellers, and Internal customers on Amazon to increase product awareness and sales by creating a promotional giveaway (e.g., sweepstakes) that is easy to set up and run. This is a US-only feature. Amazon Giveaway was completely turned off in August 2019 because of the decreasing engagement and low revenue contribution.
My role
From 2017 to 2018, I worked as a UX designer on product Amazon Giveaway mainly focusing on seller experiences.
During my time there, I contributed mainly to giveaway hosts and a few customer-facing features.
I worked with 1 PM, 1 TPM, 1 SDM, and 5 developers all located in Berlin, Germany.
What I did
• Define problem areas
• Product vision
• Design explorations
• Survey
• Walk the store usability study
• Executive presentations
• Collaborate with international partner teams including product teams, the dev team
Impact
A few proposed designs were tested and launched before I moved to another team. Launched experiences cover both customer-facing experiences and host experiences.
+4.9% page hits on the Giveaway landing page
The change only takes 1 dev 1 week effort. Design dialed up in the US.
16.37% increase for host conversion from starting the giveaway creation process through checkout.
19% increase in the volume of giveaways created.
Host experiences migrated to Seller Central.
Where everything starts
Before diving deep into Giveaway projects, I did a comprehensive audit to uncover potential host pain points. From the audit, I listed at least two projects that I can help with.
1. Simplify the host creation flow. The goal of this project was to simplify the current flow and inspired the team with a long-term vision.
2. Redesign the Giveaway management and migrate it to seller central. The goal is to provide an easy and convenient way for hosts to track their giveaway performance in seller central.
Heuristic evaluation
Walk the store with team members
I first reached out to the Seller Central research team to get research help, but they are fully booked for the entire year, so I have to pursue a different way to get some insights besides my evaluation.
• I planned 10 moderated interview sessions with different Amazon employees, most of them are PMs. 7 out of 10 came to the session.
• Give them a background story - a shoe store seller on Amazon wants to create a giveaway to boost sales and promote stores. Insights listed below:
Product level opportunities:
• Migrate onboarding, creation, and managing experiences to Seller Central so that hosts can easily manage their giveaways and reimburse costs with their business cards.
CX opportunities: Giveaway creation
• Simplify the giveaway creation flow by reducing unnecessary steps, remove low engagement giveaways, prize number auto-suggestions, etc.
• Refine all text of the creation flow to increase readability.
CX opportunities: Giveaway management
• Simplified the page by removing duplicated content, legacy links, refine the page hierarchy
• Increase visibility to the winner to keep transparency with hosts.
• Add ways to monitor the effectiveness of the giveaway, such as ROI
• Offer receipts for business reimbursement.
Giveaway creation
Jeff B escalation
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“Have backbone when I believe I am truly right.”
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There was a Jeff B. escalation regarding the reduced customer entry requirements. A seller previously used the eliminated “Follow you on Twitter” options to gain followers in a past campaign. Surprised at the option’s removal, he sent an email to Amazon. The leadership at the time asked the team to roll back the Twitter option removal and the reduction of Giveaway types. I worked with PM to pull some data to show that there weren’t clear customer benefits as the twitter engagement rate was the lowest compare with the rest of the others, and most new followers were typically fake accounts. When we removed the Twitter entry options, the test was very positive in both giveaway entries, page clicks, and revenue.
However, I prepared my design with and without the Twitter options and presented it to the leadership in case leadership wanted us to roll back. Eventually, leadership approved the decision we made, and the Twitter options were removed completely.
What has been launched?
Suggested changes include reducing giveaway types, reducing entry requirements, simplified host profile, setting all giveaways to be 7 days, and offering an easier way to create promo code.
The simplified giveaway creation process drove a 19% increase in the overall volume of giveaways created.
Migrated the giveaway creation experiences to seller central resulted in a 16.37% increase for host conversion from starting the giveaway creation process through checkout.
Migrated creation flow to seller central
Giveaway management
Did this project launch?
Due to the resource and product life cycle, none of the following proposed designs were launched before the Giveaway turned off in 2018.
Giveaway dashboard redesign
1. Recommend top-performing giveaways on top of the page. Provided an easier way to copy the past successful giveaways
2. Provide analytics for hosts to track their investment in their giveaways
3. Provide filters for different statuses of giveaways
4. Show giveaway status
5. Provide analysis for the vendor to manage their investment
6. Provide the invoice for business reimbursement
7. Visualize ROI
8. Provide transparency of giveaway winners
Other options
<- Easy to achieve option
• Most loved by PMs and developers
• Take less effort to achieve and worth trying as a short-term solution
• Reuse most of the elements on the existing dashboard
<- Combine giveaway detail and dashboard
• Simplified version than the proposed design
• Combine the giveaway detail and dashboard into one screen
• Visual hierarchy is slightly complicated
• Checkbox is hard to discover on top
• Only show the giveaway details in a more generic way
Few take-aways：
• Not everything I worked on will launch eventually, especially the blueprints, because priority shifts fast. So working on a long-term vision paired with incremental deliverables will help move things faster.
• When there is an escalation, having a backbone if I truly believe I make the right decision for the customers. Always prepare what was requested by leadership when I try to convince them there is a better option and back up the decision with data.
• Advocate for my customers. Giveaway is a special product; it has its customer-facing part and the host-facing part. After working on this project long, the team always prioritize customer-facing features over host-facing features. Advocate for host-facing features will create a better product lifecycle, and there will be more giveaways created for customers to participants.