Quantity discounts on the product detail page
During my second tour at Amazon, this time in the Amazon Business space, I owned the user experience for three big initiatives—Seller Evaluation, Business Pricing, and Services for Business. In the Business Pricing space, in addition to 1:1 buyer discount quote requests and related quote management on the seller side, I was the lead designer on the team tasked with providing a model for bulk discounts on the Amazon Business retail site.
As a result of generative research, customer feedback, sales calls, and business buyer and seller interviews we learned business customers expect a discount will be applied when purchasing in quantity, whether during a single order or recurring purchase over time. No only do business customers expect discounts for quantity purchases whether it be in a single order or over-time, suppliers want to incentivize bulk purchases, passing along cost savings related to volume sales, while stimulating customer loyalty and recurring purchases.
The challenge was how to represent available product discounts from across multiple suppliers without requiring the buying customer to visit and browse individual supplier offers the Offer Listing Page. Also, how to make sure the customer understands when changing the quantity, they are getting a lower price, and may be seeing an offer from a different seller with different ship settings. Ultimately, how do we help the customer optimize their purchases, solving for best price and preferred spend, while providing transparency and options? Quantity discounts mitigates business customer confusion and distrust by surfacing the best available price for the quantity selected from across all suppliers, respecting preferred spend and providing transparency when better pricing may be available.
The team
Neil Carr (Program Manager), Samer Kazan (Technical Program Manager), Bharath Gali (Dev Manager), Jonathan Lee-Ruso (Research), Satish Kumar Gunuputi (Engineer), Atajan Coronda (Engineer), Praveen Thummaluru (Engineer), and many others across Amazon Business, Amazon, and Marketplace.
Users
While initially this capability was envisioned for any business purchasing agent on Amazon Business, including and not limited to policy makers, purchase decision maker, and purchasing delegates, vision included extending the functionality and features to all retail customers on Amazon.com.
Process
My UX work at Amazon followed this essential pattern—Discover, Synthesize, Blueprint (Evaluate and Iterate), Prototype and Build (Evaluate and Iterate), Support and Learn (Evaluate and Iterate).
The general product flow for this initiative was… generative research, competitive landscape analysis, cross-functional team collaboration, tenet and principle definition, brainstorming, user story definition, existing platform pattern research, whiteboard modeling, feature and attribute definition, wire-framing, terminology definition, related feature impact analysis and recommendations, interaction prototyping, user testing, rinse and repeat iteration, launch development support, success metric and feedback monitoring, root issue analysis, and next steps recommendations.
Research
Research started with feedback and request insights gathered during business buyer interviews and seller sales calls. Once the project was funded and underway, customer centered findings were gathered during generative research, competitive analysis, user feedback and metrics, business buyer and seller interviews, and internal and external moderated usability sessions.
Design artifacts
From whiteboard sketches through functional prototypes, design artifacts included sketches, wireframes, illustrations, mockups, Axure prototype, functional specifications, and more.
Usability
Following internal team alignment on interaction and attributes to display, we piggy-backed on a related Amazon Business usability research study to shake out any missed user expectations and gather general sentiment for the new functionality.
Open questions
- Quantity discount discoverability and placement expectations
- Labels and values understanding
- Break point clarity
- Savings representation— per unit discount price, unit/total amount saving, percent savings, some combination, or something else
- Usability of extra selection actions to apply a quantity
- Messaging for requesting a quote clear and actionable
- General expectations around aggregated discount offers and if anything is missing
Findings
While study participants indicated they would want to see some indication in the price block to the right of the product image when quantity discount is available, we opted for simplicity, only displaying savings breakdowns on interaction or quantity >1 selection. We also observed a confirmation of our hypothesis that having to click an update button when selecting a quantity caused friction impacting completion of quantity purchases, a ‘legacy’ feature the retail team deployed to mitigate mistaken quantity purchase with extra steps for selection and confirmation. Rather than cluttering up an already very busy and overloaded product detail page, we opted for a light-weight “Quantity discount ▾” indicator in the Buybox. When one or more sellers has a quantity discount offer for the product, the quantity discount dropdown is displayed.
To jumpstart the flywheel of quantity discount offer by suppliers, we leveraged business intelligence and machine learning to determine products being purchased in quantity which would benefit most from pricing tiers and then nudged suppliers to provide quantity discounts on those SKUs. In tandem, we developed a discount request feature replacing the quantity discounts dropdown when no quantity discount offers were available form sellers, or Amazon. This allowed us to keep all quantity discount interaction in proximity to quantity selection, and landed price, in the Buybox.
Final design
Although the launch did not include Request for Quantity Discount or Quantity Discounts specific feedback widget, the request feature was included in a later release in a two-sided feature launch. Development was also delayed for various product category detail pages due to their variation from the standard ‘Legacy’ detail page. We also chose to simplify the messaging in the Buybox, removing the semi-promotional “Buy X or more for $X.XX each”, since the “Quantity discounts” dropdown is only displayed when discounts are available.
Launch and impact
During product planning the product team delayed launch to address potential trust busters. The blocker was risk for pricing abuse by sellers, we mitigated the issue with pricing rules. We also chose to include a delight feature, guiding buyers when savings is available at a nominal higher quantity.
From the customer standpoint, the new table and interaction hides behind the scenes rules and complexity of delivering the best offer for particular quantities aggregated from multiple suppliers with varied discount break points. Data indicated business buyers tend to purchase in quantity more frequently than retail consumers, suggesting an opportunity to re-envision and simplify the quantity picker for business customers purchasing in quantity. Following this launch, the product detail team conducted experiments to improve multi-unit selection experience. Because the product detail page and Buybox are already dense with information, we made recommendations to the product detail page team where trade-offs could happen to simplify, including consolidating information, removing ambiguous data, and improving readability by aligning Buybox content to the left.
Within the first month of launch, 4k sellers provided quantity discounts on 5MM product offers and business customers saved between 3% and 46% below Buybox price with an average 28% savings on those offers.
Learning and take-aways
Amazon, Amazon Business, and Marketplace are sprawling services with myriad feature-sets and owners. While the experience at times might feel ‘cohesive’, different teams own individual category Product Detail Pages, Checkout, Your Orders, Offer Listing Page, among others with each team driving innovation resulting in unique UI and interaction each of which require effort to migrate to other systems, that is if they ever adopted by other teams and system. Quantity selection is not standardized across the Amazon experience leaving the opportunity for user confusion and distrust when competitive offers from other sellers are not transparent and ubiquitous.
At the time, the product detail page had over 250 variations across product categories and purchase programs. We prioritized detail page versions representing the greatest number of ASINs and highest impact for business customers.
Next steps
Along with the product team, continued monitoring of usage metrics and anecdotal feedback to identify new opportunity and incremental improvement. On going discussions included iteration recommendations, new features, approach for additional category detail pages, a modular widget solution for use throughout product discovery and order experience, and follow-up for elements de-scoped during dev launch.
Phonetool
To highlight and promote the team’s accomplishments, I created and awarded a phone tool icon for Amazon’s internal employee directory.
