To solve the issue of formatting data for omnichannel sales, BigCommerce initiated a project that would provide a self-serve rules engine to modify thousands of product listings for channels such as Google, Meta and Snapchat.
As lead product designer from the conception, I led the experience strategy, product design and implementation of this complex undertaking.
For merchants selling online, omni-channel is crucial to the success of their e-commerce presence. Staying competitive means meeting their current market where they are, and expanding to new markets to scale their business.
BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform built on flexibility. There are many native capabilities enabling merchants to manage storefronts, products, customers and orders, but also plenty of partner integrations to fill the gaps. As such, there are a range of native and partner solutions to support a merchant’s growth depending on the stage of their omni-channel strategy. However, it comes with several complexities.
Managing omni-channel data is a full-time commitment. A merchant’s categorization of products is NEVER the same as a channel’s and product attributes are not 1:1. That means the merchant must modify their feed for every SKU for every channel - which could result in 1000’s of product modifications.
Take the adidas example above: for Google ads and Amazon, the merchant needs to find the corresponding product category AND modify the title with product attributes so the shopper has appropriate context.
To ensure merchant’s omni-channel success, BigCommerce was in need of a feed management solution for small medium businesses (SMBs) to save them countless hours optimizing product data.
To start this initiative, I led multiple service blueprinting workshops to map the merchant experience and technical limitations of the BigCommerce platform. These consisted of front-end & backend engineers, product managers, designers and UX researchers and helped all stakeholders understand the architecture.
I worked with our UX research team concurrently to understand where our merchants struggled the most. Here’s some of the highlights:
“It’s tedious and time-consuming...The Google [category] mapping is painful to go from the top level to the very bottom levels every single time.”
I have to figure out how to get information from Shopkeep to BigCommerce to Facebook. [If there’s a way to see] these are all the fields I’ve imported, these are the fields BigCommerce mapped them to and these are the fields Facebook is looks for and what’s missing.
“If you had any errors, having as much detail and as much information to say, like, how do you fix your error. So it wasn’t like [we’re] spending hours and hours trying to figure out what’s going on, how do I fix this?”
In July 2021 (one month before I joined), BigCommerce acquired the feed management platform Feedonomics. Feedonomics provides a managed service in which trained professionals optimize product data for enterprise businesses using a SQL-based UI.
We wanted to focus on 3 essential features for the product MVP for 3 channels we had close partnerships with. Because of the complexity of using Feedonomics APIs, the interface would be built on an app using BigCommerce’ design system, allowing for shorter feedback loops and less infrastructure setbacks.
Over the course of several months, we crafted designed a UI according to the desired user experience, product needs, API capabilities and existing platform workflows.
With final validation from users, I worked closely with our front-end engineers to implement the UI and test on sandbox stores.
While the core experience was in development, we started discovery on how to integrate the service with the BigCommerce platform and identify additional dependencies.
This included crucial items such as discovery and billing of the optimized listings service, which required cross-collaboration and iteration with multiple other teams across BigCommerce.
For instance, we didn't have a pattern for upgrades (how we ultimately framed the service) so we needed to create a new experience and set the standard for new initiatives.
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