So many people are realizing the power of Amazon and I’m not talking about getting packages in an hour (which is incredible, thanks Jeff!). I’m talking about making money selling on Amazon. Smartscout, started by the legendary Scott Needham, was built to help Amazon sellers get better data and understand what they can do to grow their business. Scott came to me wanting help with a simple business metric: churn.
How we helped
How to improve churn? Talk to users!
Churn (a fancy word for people who leave after being a customer) is something all businesses are working on improving. Oftentimes, there isn’t one thing that is causing it. To find ways to improve Smartscout, we talked to their users. We set up user interviews with 5 current Smartscout customers, as well as a few people in the Amazon world who don't know about Smartscout. What was causing confusion? Turns out, many people were confused when they started a free trial. Smartscout has over 10 incredible tools, but beginners were overwhelmed figuring out which ones would help them.
A new onboarding experience
To help put people in the right direction, we designed a new user onboarding flow. Smartscout is designed to do a lot of things. What we did is simply let users tell us what they were doing. Were they selling on Amazon as their own brand? Were they doing arbitrage? (another fancy word, no time to explain.) We let users self-select. Once selected, they would land on a page showing them specific tools that can be useful for them. We simplified the side navigation to make sure they were pulled to only the tools they needed, while still making the other tools available if needed.
Video guides to add to the solution
We knew self-selection was part of the solution, but we wanted more. We knew from user research people had a hard time learning. Smartscouts tool's can do an amazing number of things and I didn’t want to ruin that functionality. So, our solution was to provide training in the form of simple courses. These courses are broken down into three-to-five minute chunks, letting users quickly learn the tools and get on to growing their business. While this project is currently in development, the user interviews we did with the new design give us high confidence users will stay longer!
