Developing a rich “Special Offers and Discounts” experience for Amazon shoppers

The problem

Shoppers in India are budget conscious. They seek deals and look for the best value. Offers and promotions drive their purchase decisions as their goal is to maximise their savings. Amazon shoppers found it hard to discover offers on the shopping app and in turn were reluctant to come to a purchase decision. Offers and promotions appeared inconsistently and repetitively across the product detail pages on Amazon. A study also found that shoppers engaged in cross-retailer price comparisons to find the lowest price on an item of interest. In April 2018, through an end-to-end “Affordability” CX redesign initiative, the ShopX India team saw an opportunity to fix issues and support this customer behaviour. We wanted to make it simple for shoppers to make any transaction affordable on Amazon and be assured that they were getting the best value.

Users & audience

Amazon shoppers from across different demographics, especially new-to-Amazon (N2A) customers.

Team & role

In my new role as design manager for the ShopX design pod, I led a cross-pod team of 3 designers to redesign the offers and discounts CX as part of the end-to-end “Affordability” CX product initiative. The project aimed to not only redesign the offers & discounts widget on the detail page but also design affordability touch-points across the entire shopping funnel.

Design process & insights

At Amazon India, 3 different teams were tackling a similar problem around offers and discounts CX – the core ShopX, consumer electronics category and payments teams. We launched several experiments and iterated on the designs to first consolidate offers & discounts in a single widget and make discovery simpler on detail pages. These were incremental enhancements to the offers CX. Learnings from the Initial design iterations and experiments yielded these findings:

1. The consolidation of offers in a single widget in a predictable place on the detail page was appreciated by all test participants. We consolidated 6 promotion types and saw a significant increase in key promotion attach rates.
2. However, customers were not clear about how to avail of the offers, how many offers can be availed or if offers can be combined or not.
3. The static order in which the offers were presented made it difficult for customers to choose the most relevant offers. Surfacing the best offer upfront makes it more valuable for them
4. Customers wanted to avoid the hassle of doing the mental math to arrive at total savings by availing of multiple offers.

We then ran cross-functional design workshops to collectively understand the insights from each team’s perspective and pool ideas to arrive at a scalable and extensible solution that addressed each stakeholder’s customer needs. We focused on mapping out the end-to-end journey for the offers experience from discovery through product evaluation, value comprehension and final purchase. To envision how an ideal state offers CX would look like, we collaborated and included it as part of a separate discovery sprint aimed at reimagining the overall detail pages of CX.

Design solution

In a phased approach, we designed and tested a series of treatments for the deals card on the homepage, the offers widget on the details page, the search face out and the payment page at checkout.

Offers widget on the product detail page

End-state offers CX design explorations

Outcome & learnings

We conducted usability studies of the proposed end-to-end experience and drove alignment across category teams for defining standardised offer types, terminology and payment concepts like No Cost EMI. We also created and published guidelines for how offer widgets should be used. The new offers CX was launched in late 2019 successfully and saw a substantial uptick in key promotion attach rates. The design will continue to evolve towards the end-state vision for affordability CX.