What is Trada?

Why is supporting Brand-led Promotions important?

Running an eCommerce marketplace means you're consistently battling issues from all fronts: whether it's improving conversion rate, convincing brands to transact through the platform, or managing marketing budget.

One of the tried and true ways of improving conversion rate is to run promotions and discounts. In a marketplace platform like Trada, there are two ways promotions can be run:

The first way is through a platform-led promotion, where Trada subsidizes the discount given to customers. While this is a very effective way to improve conversion, it comes at a great cost. The budget to support the promotion comes from Trada's marketing budget, and it gets burnt through very quickly.

The second way is brand-led promotions, which allows brands that lists their products in Trada to run and manage their own promotions. Not only was this a highly requested feature by our brands, it was also an appealing feature for Trada as it allowed us to improve our conversion rate without burning our marketing budget - the discounts would be offered by brands themselves directly for their customers.

Defining Feature Requirements

Based on feedback from brands and competitor research, we identified the following requirements for the first iteration of the promotion feature:

• Promotion Type — Brands must be able to specify whether it is an automatically-applied promotion or if a discount code is required. Discount code must be active across all active promotions.
• Discount Type — Brands must be able to select a type of discount. We identified two types of discounts to support: Flat discount or Tiered discount.
• Discount Unit — Brands must also be able to specify the unit of discount - whether it's percentage discount or fixed amount.
• Promotion Scope — Brands must also be able to specify whether the discount applies only to select customers or selected variants
• Promotion Mechanics — Brands must be able to specify whether the discount is time-based or usage-based
• Editing Promotion — Once a promotion has been created, we do not let user edit the promotion. If they made a mistake, they will have to cancel the promotion and create another one.
• Delete Promotion — Promotion cannot be deleted, but it can be stopped.
• Active Promotions — For the first iteration, we only support one active promotion
• Timezone — Support only Pacific Time Zone at the moment

Translating Feature Requirements into User Experience

As lead product designer, I took the feature requirements and translated them into the following experiences within Trada:

1. List of promotion

First things first, we needed a starting point for brands to create and define the promotion they want to run. We already have an admin section for brands to manage their activities on Trada, and Promotions naturally fits right in to the sidebar.

If a brand has not ran any promotions before, this page would display an empty state with a call-to-action to create a promotion.

Otherwise, brands might need to refer to a past promotion or might be running several promotions concurrently (in the future, when it is supported). As such, this page will show any past and current promotions.

2. Create a promotion

Clicking on the create promotion button from the promotion list page takes user to this page.

This page houses the most complex design and engineeering work for this project. All the feature requirements listed above need to be taken into account when creating a promotion.

Because of the complexity in defining a promotion, I have reserved a space on the right hand side to display a summary of the promotion defined so far. This widget will change dynamically depending on the option selected, and it's fixed to the side so that brands can quickly glance at it to make sure they've selected the right requirements even as they're scrolling up and down.

Before a promotion can be activated, I used the existing modal component to communicate the restrictions in editing promotion.

3. In-platform entry points

Once the promotion feature has been launched, how will these promotions be shown on the platform so that Trada's users are aware of them? I identified a few touch points within the platform to help display the promotions:

1. On "All Brands" Listing Page

Create a badge on brands offering promotions for better visibility

2. Create "Brands on Promo" page

Highlight a dedicated section for brands that are currently running promotions

3. On specific brand page and product page

Highlight the promotion and mechanics on brand page and product page to further drive the success of the promotion

4. On shopping cart

If users have added products from a brand that's currently running a promotion, we highlight the discount applied or the minimum amount required to hit the promotion.

4. Invoices and Order Page

For admin and accounting purposes, we also needed to make sure that the discount were clearly shown on invoices and completed orders. I did this by simply adding a line item to the invoice and orders.

Results after launch

The brand-led promotion feature was launched in July 2022. Within 10 days of launching the feature, 184 brands (13% of all brands that were active on Trada at that time) have created a promotion. Three months later, this number increased to 30% of active brands running promotions on Trada.

Ultimately, as a result of this feature launch along with other features we developed for Trada, conversion rate went up from 4.9% in July 2022 to 9.6% by October 2022.

Wishlist

Being a small team, we didn't have much resources on hand. Here are a few things I would have improved on if we had the time and resources to develop this feature further:

• Reporting section for each promotion — As brands started running more promotions, it would be very useful for them to be able to see performance of past promotions.
• Promotion validity — Lots of work could be improved on this portion, for example allowing more than one promotion to be run concurrently, defining the timezone of the validity, and allowing evergreen promotion code that's always running (for example for any new visitor).
• Editing discounts — It would be helpful to support editing discounts after it had been created. We did not get the chance to fully explore this on the engineering side to see what's possible.
• Track revenue driven directly by the promotion feature — We only tracked overall conversion for Trada, and did not track revenue or conversion driven directly by this feature. It would have made a more compelling story if we had this number!