Kaufland Seller Portal

Seller Portal Redesign

Empowering sellers with intuitive tools and streamlined processes, simplifying success in every step of their journey

Overview

One of my first projects in Kaufland was the redesign of the Seller portal, in which the sellers that are selling on Kaufland ecommerce marketplace manage their shop from their inventory, incoming orders and settings.

Role

Product designer

Team

2 Product Managers
3 UX Designer
3 front-end developers
3 back-end developers

Project Timeline

Aug 2023- Ongoing

Tools

Figma | Miro

My Contributions

Responsible for analytics dashboard of the seller portal, Research and interviews, part of ideation and startegy planning with the team, low to high-fi prototyping, user testing

The Problem

The current seller portal of our eCommerce marketplace is difficult to use, lacks essential features, and does not provide sufficient data analytics. Sellers find it challenging to manage their inventory, track sales, and engage with customers. We need to redesign the portal to improve user experience, streamline inventory management, enhance sales tracking, and offer better customer engagement tools.

Screenshot of the old seller area before the resdesign

Design Process

1 Research

2 Define

3 Ideation

4 Design

5 User Testing

RESEARCH

User Interviews

Surveys

As part of my user research, I conducted interviews with sellers to gather detailed insights into their needs and preferences. I also distributed surveys to a wider audience to collect quantitative data.

Findings from User Research

The challenges with the old design was that

We weren't helping sellers to quickly understand how they were performing on our marketplace.
We didn't communicate our performnce expectations
The overall structure of the portal had been mostly dictated by technical structure and not the actual customer journey

Benchmarking

To understand how our seller portal compares to others, I conducted a competitor analysis. I explored several leading eCommerce platforms, examining their seller portals in detail. I looked at features, ease of use, and overall design. I also read reviews and feedback from sellers using those platforms. This helped me identify the strengths and weaknesses of each portal, giving us valuable insights into what works well and what can be improved in our own redesign.

Ideation

As a result of user research, we started ruthless prioritization of features to increase focus while also improving the overall information architecture for sellers

We did this with the help of tools like content-square and Tableau to make decisions based on the data we had about the actual usage of the features, although this whole initiative was an effort to break the chains of legacy code base, which hindered our delivery speed drastically.

Furthermore we were able to reduce the number of different layouts to three base layouts in total with which all teams involved could build all needed pages for their parts of the portal. This helped heaps with the teams velocity but also with overall cohesion throughout the project.

Final Designs

One of the aforementioned in depth analysis is depicted here. The dashboard enables sellers to track the development of their sales, inventory and sales channel.

Before we started, list of orders etc. We aggregated all kind of status in one list which had to be filtered manually. As part of redesign, we went with settings default and tried to guide users

One of the optimizations of IA led to the development of a "Side panel" which helped us make the experience a bit more "snappy" and web appy" by getting rid of an extra page.

Things we did as well!

Redefined our area's rollout strategy with the help of Optimizely and the possibilty to rollback releases.
Set up an alignment communication decision tree for the teams
Added a notification center
Set up a reference customer program for ease of access to B2B testers
Built a service blueprint for further discovery and alignment
Started multiple foundational discovery studies.

All of this happened with a completely overhauled product area, meaning in the midst of a storming phase of newly mixed and setup teams, so of course we ran into a lot of friction, which transformed our processes.

Finally we managed to launch the new portal, and work since then to optimize further and further due to reduction of technical debt, which has helped us to increase our seller's performance significatly.

Late deliveries, for example decreased from 23% in 2022 to 7.4% in 2023 and further to 4.2% in June 2024.

Thank you for reading. Questions? Let's chat about this case study in detail.