Background

Over the last few years, a revolution in global commerce has occurred, with entrepreneurs and manufacturers  disinter mediating traditional resellers by selling directly to customers—at historically low prices.  As a leader of e-tail giants, Amazon's plan is to build the lowest cost e-commerce supply chain for goods from key manufacturing hubs, to customers around the world. 

This is a position supported by the 2017 letter to shareholders where Jeff Bezos revealed that more than 75% of the top 5,000 e-commerce brands are selling across every Amazon store worldwide. Analysts attribute this figure to Amazon’s global distribution solution, which provides businesses of all shapes and sizes access to Prime customers around the world, without the burden of high infrastructure, labor, and logistics costs. 

Mission

• Amazon greatly simplified international shipment booking, coordination, tracking, and payments; it transforms a historically high touch, high overhead process into a streamlined online workflow.

• Amazon offers a fully integrated Customs and Trade solution, which provides its Selling Partners with low cost, automated customs clearance, inclusive of services that help sellers manage their compliance obligations.

• Selling Partners inbound to a single origin hub, where proprietary systems will optimize global inventory placement.

Challenges 

"Cost and complexity of international logistics” was the top blocker for global expansion from  a recent Selling Partner survey. In 2018, more than 75% of Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) shipments from CN to US/EU move through air through small parcel air freight causing selling selection gaps, limited shipping options, and high cost of goods sold.   

As the UX lead and manager owing product experiences, my responsibilities were

• Defined 3-year plan (2019-21) with partner teams across multiple orgs and regions   

Conducted a series of research, including Seller Roundtable at Amazon China Global Selling Cross-border E-commerce Summit in Shanghai, to influence project roadmaps. Traveled to Beijing and Hyderabad for off-site planning with different tech teams. 

• Hired and managed UX team to deliver solutions across multiple Seller Partner platforms 

Delivered the first MVP workflows in Amazon Seller Central platform to enable Amazon Global Logistics (AGL) capabilities. Built a UX team of 4 UX designers (including 2 Sr. UXDs) across Seattle, Beijing, and Shanghai. Delivered end-to-end workflow experiences for 3 platforms (Seller Central, Shipper Central, and Operational Console).   

• Established UX mechanisms to ensure across orgs collaboration and product qualities 

Established a Voice of Seller program (gathering seller feedback from 1:1 interview and survey), and UX design office hours (providing consultation for projects not in the UX roadmaps). Owned UX check-in meetings (every two months) with senior stakeholders to share findings from seller studies, present UX strategies and design walkthrough, and update status of UX roadmaps/resources.     

Results

• Increased Amazon Global Logistics (AGL) inbounded FBA units from China to US, EU5, and JP from XMM units to YMM units with 10% units adoption goal +113% YoY.

• Reduced variable operating costs for US, EU, and JP from $X per shipment (Includes Origin and Destination) to $Y per shipment, a reduction of 38% YoY.

• Reduced 28% time of booking creation by launching Shipping preference on Unified Shipment Workflow leveraging Seller Behavior Metrics data.

• Achieved 100% SP studies of key projects (total 22 studies and interviewed 130+ SPs) and drove average 4.43/5 seller satisfaction rates of global shipment booking flow in Seller Central.

Creating more nuanced seller segmentation in terms of company size, structure, and their roles are key to defining project experiences 

Based on the quarterly seller survey (265), we found different roles (business owner, product operator, logistics specialist, logistics manager) have different responsibilities. Currently, it’s difficult for us to map sellers’ roles and responsibilities to company size associated due to (1) definition of sizing seller companies changed from GMS (company size: L=$1M+, M=$100k-1M, S=$1-100k USD) to shipment units (L= top 40%, M= the second 40%, S= the bottom 20%), (2) company size doesn’t represent sellers’ roles and responsibilities. Many exceptions like trading companies operated by <5 staffs generating high GMS and shipment unit classified as M/L size, but they work with logistics providers. We would like to propose the definition of seller segmentation should be around their knowledge of cross-border transportation, their motivation of adopting, and their expectations of outcomes. 

Seller behaviors and mental model for FBA Global shipment workflow

This journey map demonstrates the end to end Global FBA shipping workflow from CN across Seller Central (Send to Amazon, Unify Shipping Workflow) and Shipper Central as the baseline to map the Selling Partners’ tasks, key moments, and feedback captured by SP interviews of three key projects: (1) Importer of Record (IOR) integration, (2) Send to Amazon (STA) Unit Seep Feed (USF) Minimum Lovable Product (MLP), and (3) SKU Compliance features (bulk upload, Manage Your Compliance, HTS decision tree, and Valuation anomaly detection). To understand our SPs, we attached SPs’ roles and goals identified by 10 SPs studies (total 50+ SPs), quarterly surveys (total 265 SPs), and reviewed with Global Mile CN Sales and Marketing teams. 

This journey map is a star ting point for us to map seller roles and tasks to all Global Shipping and Compliance projects and dive deep into the competitor workflow. We hope teams could use it to refine BRD, prioritize OP, and inform strategies to streamline the experience.