Facebook
Marketplace
Building buyer experiences that fostered a safer, more immersive and personalized marketplace.
Marketplace was my first foray into what it's like to really work on consumer products at scale. I joined in mid 2020 where we were averaging over 1+ billion monthly active users.
That's an insane amount of reach but also responsibility as a designer. There are only a handful of products that have that large scale impact all over the world (we were in over 100 markets at the time).
It was during this time that I ramped up on Facebook's bottoms-up experimentation culture, and the challenges that come with trying to iterate fast and not cut corners.
I joined the buyer experiences team, and we had free reign to focus on whatever problems we thought would generate more engagement, but also in general improve the shopping experience.
I've highlighted a few of the projects we launched/tested in my time there:
- PDP evolution
- Video-based shopping
- B2C feed disambiguation (Shops)
- Smart recommendations
- Structured Offers
- Recommerce / Young Adult engagement
- Navigation refresh
- Values-based commerce
Imagining a video-first marketplace
Marketplace had already reached max market cap in local markets in the US by the time I joined the team. The next big thing that we were focusing on to continue that J-curve growth was expanding to dominate shipped transactions.
However research showed that trust factors were the main problem holding back transactions and wanting to see an item in person was the #1 reason buyers don’t buy a shipped item.
Video showed that the item is in the seller’s possession and that the seller is a “real person”. It could also show that the item is functional (i.e. laptop) and helps better determine whether the item is as described (condition, color, size, etc).
Additional data showed that video was already latent behaviour that would organically happen in marketplace threads, so I started pitching the idea of a video-first experience.
The mission was to create a more engaging shopping experience and meet our users at the medium they prefer.
We successfully launched video on PDP, showing that listings with video had 2.5x increase in transactions. This validated our initial hypothesis that we could create a fly-wheel effect for sellers where they would be motivated to create high quality video listing because they would sell faster.
Engaging young adults while promoting social good
Another project I wanted to highlight was our effort around personal values. This was something that might seem odd to think about when designing for an ecommerce platform, but we noticed an opportunity that I like to values based commerce.
Young adults have been fleeing Facebook as platform for the last few years for many reasons. Marketplace we learned was many times the ONLY reason they ever used Facebook app, and even then DAP had been decreasing.
After some research, we identified that one of the top JTBD and motivators for YA is being able to shop in a way that supports their values. Equally for sellers they want to be able to express their identity as a seller, business, brand.
The most important values where equally supporting diverse sellers and supporting sustainable sellers. So we came up with a roll out strategy of highlighting items and sellers at every step of the shopping journey. Showcasing the benefits of sustainable shopping and certified products.
This was the last project I pitched before I changed teams to Reality Labs. The team launched with the first #buyblack campaign to great reception and is looking to expand to all minority sellers as of Q3 2022.