thredUP | Designing a Better Seller Experience | UX Research and Testing

We partnered up with thredUP to improve the seller experience via the seller history flow.

Duration: Two and half weeks

Designers: A team of three designers

thredUP's PROBLEM:

thredUp's existing sellers, while happy with the seller experience and layout overall, have been experiencing painpoints around payout, time to process items and acceptance of items.

GOAL

The painpoints we consistently came across were technically business problems. As UX designers, though we could not change thredUP's business model, we wanted to see how we could address these issues and enhance the seller experience.

Interactive Prototype: A Better Seller Experience

Case Study

WHAT DOES THREDUP DO?

thredUP is an online fashion resale shop, specializing in women's and children’s clothing. thredUP helps helps you clear out your closet and earn a little cash for the items you’re no longer wearing.

Sellers can sell on thredUP by:

Ordering a Clean Out Kit, and then may send in clothes free of charge
Once thredUP receives the kit, they will processes items and accept items that meet thredUP's quality standards
Upload accepted items, product descriptions, photos
For items that thredUP cannot resell, they will responsibly recycle the unaccepted items.

Competitive & Comparitive Analysis

During our first client meeting, thredUP came to us with a request to fix the overall seller experience. They did not have specific objects or ideas they wanted us to explore and implement.

To begin we took a look at thredUP's major competitors and what we liked about each site's features and UI.

Questions to ask Sellers

We had access to the email lists of existing sellers. We opted to just do personal interviews rather than a survey. We started out by coming up with a list of questions we hoped to ask each seller.

Seller Interviews

We scheduled interviews with nine different sellers. We set up the appointments using youcanbook.me, which allowed sellers to pick their own appointment time. We also asked thredUP if we could offer an incentive as we knew this would encourage sellers to talk to us, and they agreed to a $20 thredUP store credit.

Sellers love thredUP!

And they generally loved the layout of the seller history page.

“I love how simple it is to bag up and sell.”
- Tina

“I get money for clothes I was going to donate anyways, and I can use that for new clothes.”
- Kaitlin

But there were some consistent pain points

Bags take too long to receive and process

Three out of Eight sellers, haven’t been able to get a bag processed.

“[The] turnaround time is a while [and it’s] getting frustrating.”
- Rose Marie

“Lately, I haven’t been able to get a bag.
It’s been over three months.”
- Wanda

Payout is too low

Seven out of eight sellers are not satisfied with the payout (the amount of money a seller receives for the clothes they sold to thredUP).

“The pricing structure changed. It used to be better.”
- Alexa

“Idon’t get enough for the items.”
- Janeen

“I’m not satisfied, but I’m okay with it because it's better than nothing.”
- Rose Marie

Personas

After learning some key insights from user interviews and from the competitive and comparative analysis we could create our personas.

First Round of Wireframes

We presented our first round of wireframes to the client and they were pleased with our direction.

1. Best Selling Items

We created a graph that would have seller's best selling items so they would know which of their items sell best and that would influence what they should send in.