Meesho hosts upwards of half a million sellers on its platform. A huge chunk of these sellers are from tier 2/3+ cities and aren’t digitally native. Therefore, their success on the platform relies heavily on the usability and effectiveness of our features.
The ‘Advertisement’ option was one of our key impact features designed to help sellers increase their reach. This feature allowed sellers to select a catalog and advertise it to the buyers on our platform for as little as ₹100 per campaign!
It was an instant hit. We saw a huge uptick in volume of campaigns created each day and consequently a jump in our revenue. And since Meesho has a 0% commission policy, this feature became a crucial revenue stream.
But eventually, we discovered a few friction points that were hindering the campaign creation process.
This straightforward challenge had a seemingly simple answer: Allow sellers to advertise multiple catalogs through a single campaign. But there were several design decisions that went into making it a viable and comprehensive product feature.
Here’s unpacking those design decisions:
Discovering seller intent
Backed by UR and data, we zeroed in on two key intents:
Sellers select high selling catalogs to boost sales
- High selling catalogs is a validation that they are being liked by buyers.
- Ads increase their customer reach.
- Lower chances of returns; ensuring higher profits.
Sellers select new catalogs for validations
- Ads work as a platform to validate whether new catalogs are being liked by buyers or not.
- They need higher visibility to compete with similar products by other sellers.
- Ads provide a chance to jump-start orders and get the reviews, and ratings for new catalogs.
Design Approach
Considering our sellers are not digitally native, we decided to keep a short learning curve and maintain minimal design elements.
The Solution
With set design guidelines and data insight in place, we designed the new multi-catalog campaign creation and performance management interface:
The validation
User Testing was aimed at identifying any loopholes or inconsistencies that might have crept in during the process. We also observed seller behaviour for insights: the way they interact and also document what they speak.
Here’s what we found:
“ I used to keep a predefined budget of ₹2000 for Ads. I had to create 4 campaigns separately with a budget of ₹500 each. With the new option of multi catalog campaign, creating Ads will get easier for me” — Meesho Seller
The revamped campaign creation process caused an 80% increase in the number of catalogs advertised. Sellers were able to reach more customers while monitoring their best selling catalogs. Consequently, this caused our ad revenue to shoot up by a sharp 30%.
We have modified the campaign creation process by adding data driven recommendations techniques. To know more, stay tuned to this page!
And it's a wrap!
Thanks to Rahul Srivastava, Prasanna Arunachalam and Shraddha Vimal who supported and helped me while working on this project.
Special thanks to Usman Zafar for helping me while write this blog.
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