Price Auditing

2020-2023
Pricing items correctly is a life and death matter for online retailers. Before they press "Go" and edit thousands of prices at once, our users wanted to double and triple check if they got it right.

The Problem

Pricing is life and death for any online retailer. Our customers need to know what the impact of their work before it goes live, so I designed a method for users to spot check their work as they built out strategies, ensuring that results would meet expectations.

1. Live Preview

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2. Simulation

Once a pricing strategy is built, Price Practice allows the user to have a realistic snapshot of pricing changes for all products across all of their strategies before setting anything live. It could take into account a wholistic scenario versus the singular focus of the Live Preview.

3. Inspector

Customers consistently told our team that they spend an enormous amount of their workday chasing down singular products to answer the question, “why is this product priced this way?” The price inspector allows the users to see what happened during the most recent pricing run. The user can select a single product and see the factors that went into deciding a price, when it changed, if it was changed by a specific user account. This is an after-the-fact troubleshooting mechanism designed to make our customers lives much easier.

Interesting Insights

A few pieces of research that drove the way the features were created are:

In Live Preview, one of our research hypotheses was that our users expected rapid results, running many small tests. We were completely incorrect: our customers preferred accuracy over speed. To paraphrase, “If we knew that the prices you showed would be 100% accurate, we’d be willing to wait up to an hour to get those reports.” This changed our approach from designing a feature that was automatically crunching numbers into something that could be done on-demand.
The Inspector started out as just a feature to tell the user which pricing strategy was used to recommend a price for a specific listing, but it bloomed into a much more in-depth analysis as our users took us through their real-world auditing process as it currently existed. By adding a bunch of data points, we were told that we saved our users up to 10 hours of their working week.

Take a look at what one of our users thought about it: