Rich content for the product page. API integration

Date

2017

Role

Design Team Lead for international markets

Team

Moscow UED Team

Overview

In 2017 Alibaba Group opened a self-operated cross-border business in Russia. A local project called Tmall Aliexpress with its own set of products, services, and benefits. 

That required strict control of the genuine products, expanding the consumer electronics categories of products, improvement of the product description, and search on the AliExpress platform.

Team and Collaboration

I was the product owner of the product detail page localization. During this project a had to collaborate with many XFT teams. To secure the creation, shipment, and production. I participated in user research. I had to plan the budget, work together with the legal team.

Understanding the Context

Taobao.com (domestic retailing website of Alibaba Group) is an e-commerce platform with 755 million MAU, offered to buyers not only the product specification but also the emotional touch. 

On the contrary western e-comm offered a really detailed specification, but narrow visual content without emotional connections, sometimes with lack of accessibility. Taobao.com (Alibaba Group) established the concept of rich content that we wanted to localize. 

The strategy was to create a rich content product page that will contain the necessary information, however, with more details and an emotional atmosphere.

Business objectives

  • Localize PDP
  • Increase buyers trust
  • PDP D-O conversion above the Russian industry average
  • Optimize service cost reduction

Users objectives

  • Struggle to find the information they need to make decisions
  • Have trouble finding key information
  • Unnecessarily complicated interaction and visual design
  • Content is written from the seller’s point of view, not the customer’s

Focus on user research

User-research on the ground helped us to talk and learn directly from the local users. Internal research indicates current problems and opportunities. By solving the problems we had an opportunity to reach to more buyers.

+ Attitudinal

+ Qualitative

+ Behavioural

+ Competitive research

Understanding the user

In qualitative research, we were able to create personas. See what users like dislike, desire to have.

For AE the Product description has a higher value for the new/unknown products and technically advanced products.

Prototype

At that moment we had general numbers like bounce rate, D-O conversion rate. So we can only rely on the behavioral study cases. During user research I created user flows that help determines how many screens are needed, what order they should appear in, and what components need to be presented.

Guidelines

The next stage was to start by defending the design principles and create a flexible component system.

Clear – easy scanning the product description.

Consistent – use the same patterns in PDP design. I collaborate together with the Content Team to keep content short, clear, and simple with plain Russian. 

Trustworthy – use only high-quality assets.

Flex structure – to make it skiable for the marketplace, and accessible for various sellers. 

Third parties hire, onboarding, and management

The goal for the production was huge our team couldn’t cover the amount of SKU needed to be produced. Together with the business team, we decided to hire a local partner who can deliver the result quickly in the same time zone without language issues.

We didn’t have a workflow system that gave real-time communication of capacity and full transparency of work in progress. I took responsibility to adapt the tool (in Chinese) and create a workflow according to our needs. 

I helped the outsourced parties understand the business and its goals.
Supplement written communication with wireframes, annotated diagrams, and other visual aids to clearly convey the needs.

Result

  • Clear — easy scanning the product description.
  • Consistent — use the same patterns in pdp design, to make the user familiar with its structure.

As a result, consumers started to give feedback to the products, which has increased trust and positively impacted sales.

Trust

The crucial metrics for buyers are the number of product sales and reviews.

5-star products are automatically boosted by the search algorithm and have a strong impact on PDP conversion rate.

Finally, the buyer’s trust is very important for the successful sale performance. 

UX analysis

In order to get a better understanding of the mains struggle of the consumers, I collaborate with the user research team.

After launch, I conducted a monthly performance review of the pages based on internal Alibaba tools. However, we didn’t have native HTML so couldn’t measure the result effectively. That led me to rethink the process and suggest API.

Stage 2. API integration

APIs allow the creation of connections between AliExpress platform and a wide range of other eCommerce sites.

The current manual approach was inefficient, cost-consuming.

I suggested an API approach, signed and onboarded the new external partner with API integration expertise.

I convinced the majority of stakeholders including senior directors to support me.

Result of API

API integration in the AliExpress platform was complex at the beginning and require custom development, however, by API integration with our partner, we succeed to reduce the cost by 95%, the solution pulled and refreshed over 10,000 products daily.

The Product Detail Page D-O conversion rate outperformed platform avg by 3%

Before my intervention, AE D-O conversion was below the Russian industry average for high-end consumer electronics (based on scoring agencies data).

Under my lead within 4 months, the XFN team met and exceeded the goal to deliver a product detail page with an industry average D-O conversion rate. Moreover, we outperformed AE D-O conversion by 3% and was above the industry average.

Conclusion and learning

Turning failure into opportunity:  API could go early, I argued that our problem can be avoided if we had more Ops and engineering support. That’s how we got resources for A/B testing and following qualitative research.

Scaling the experience: Working with company infrastructure in the new zone of responsibility helped me to scale the experience across the company for new business in Spain and other markets.