M-Commerce: How we hacked favorites
How a quick hack on user’s favorites increased our buy conversion to 33% at Totspot.
Totspot is a mobile app for buying and selling used kids fashion mom to mom, across the US. We are seeing a tremendous growth in user adoption and more importantly, 30% month over month growth in revenue.
To reach this point we did a lot of UI/UX hacks to increase our buy conversion. However, hacking “favorites list” is one of the UX hacks that I will discuss in this blog.
Places to Buy
Totspot app has four places where the users can buy the listed items:
Main Feed: Shows featured items and items from your followings
Tots Profile page: Shows items according to a user’s kids’ profile.
Seller’s Closet page: Shows items from a seller.
Favorites page: Shows items a user has liked.
From mix panel data, we were seeing a low buy conversion on the closet and the favorites page. After some digging, we found out the following behavior and the reason for low conversion:
- A buyer goes to a seller’s closet page and likes multiple items.
- Then she asks the seller to create a bundle of her liked items to save on shipping.
- Once the bundle is created, the buyer buys it right away.
We noticed that while many users were bundling, it wasn’t easy for buyers and sellers to communicate clearly on what items were part of the bundles. A buyer would typically say “please bundle my likes”. The seller was then assigned the herculean task of wading through all her listings to find out the items liked by the buyer.
Or, she would go to alerts screen and sift through multiple notifications of follow, share, purchases, sales, etc, to find out notifications from this buyer.
This was tedious and not always accurate as the seller would sometime miss some of the liked item. So there was a lot of back and forth communication that delayed the sale of bundles.
We took the problems to the drawing board and tried to figure out an optimal and quick solution to ease the bundling.
Before we started, we wrote down the problem statements:
- Buyer is not able to see her favorites from a seller on her own favorites page.
- Buyer is not able to see her favorites on the seller’s closet page.
- Seller is not able to see the buyer’s favorites on her own closet page.
- Seller has to sift through the notifications to find the buyer’s likes.
The solution:
A buyer should be able to see her favorites from
a. Her favorites page, and
b. From the seller’s closet page.
A seller should be able to see the buyer’s favorites
a. From her own closet page, and
b. From her alerts page.
So we did the following changes for the buyer:
We introduced a new button “My Likes” on a seller’s closet page.
When a buyer goes to a seller’s closet, she would simply click on the ‘my likes’ button to check her liked items. This ensured that she is bundling the correct, liked items. Once she is convinced of her likes on the closet, she would request the seller to create a bundle for her likes.
Similarly, change was required on My Favorites page.
A buyer may be bundling a lot from multiple sellers. She would usually like different items and later on goto her favorites page to visit her likes. Since the favorites page was full of likes from different sellers, we put a search bar on the top of buyer’s favorites page. Now, the buyer could easily search for her favorites from a seller by typing the seller’s name.
For a seller, we did the following:
On the seller’s closet page, we put a search bar on the top which enabled the seller to find the items liked by a prospective buyer. It made bundling items easier for the seller.
Also, a seller usually gets notifications when someone likes an item. Earlier we used to show only one item that was liked by a buyer, but we tweaked it show all the other items liked by this buyer in the same notification. This helped to seller to view all the liked items by a buyer in one place.
All these tweaks were quick fixes and simple fillers in the gap. What we learnt out of these hacks that we will always have gaps to be filled, however, each filler needs a thorough thinking and understanding of the user behavior on the app.
The best solution would have been to introduce a bundling feature, but until we do, these tweaks and hacks get the job done as fast as possible, giving us time to think on the next feature on bundling.
At startups that’s the rule: Move Fast.
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