amazon seller central
Turning Client Onboarding Into One Shared Workflow
Redesigning the new seller experience to help more high-intent signups become active, successful sellers on Amazon.
My Role
Product Designer / UX Lead
Timeline
2022–2023
Scope
Research · UX Strategy · IA · Interaction Design · Prototyping · Testing
Impact at a glance
6 surfaces
One shared system
3 teams
One seller journey
Lower drop-off
Across the critical first 90 days
The problem
Client onboarding stretched across multiple teams, systems, and handoffs, with more than 10 employees involved in a typical case. Poor coordination and limited visibility could add four to six weeks to onboarding — while the platform reflected internal operations rather than the people trying to move a client through them.
The strategic shift
Research showed that the problem wasn’t simply an outdated interface — it was a fragmented operating model. I worked backward from how onboarding teams actually coordinated work, then redesigned the experience around shared progress, clearer ownership, and the information each role needed to move a client forward.
Key decisions
Reframe COLT around the end-to-end onboarding journey rather than internal system structure
Create role-based experiences for employees with different responsibilities and information needs
Make ownership, status, dependencies, and next steps visible across teams
Simplify complex workflows while preserving the flexibility needed for exceptions and corrections
Standardize language, guidance, and error handling across the onboarding experience
Outcome
The redesigned experience reduced unnecessary coordination and made onboarding progress easier to understand across teams. Post-launch research showed improvements in setup, completion, and multi-contact workflows, while the platform established a foundation for continued modernization of the client onboarding experience.
THE DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we turn fragmented onboarding efforts into one coherent path toward a seller’s first successful sale?
What We Learned
No shared definition
Teams meant different things when they said “new seller.”
No shared north star
Teams optimized for wayfinding, incentives, and program adoption independently.
No clear owner
The journey crossed organizational and technical boundaries.
No visible sequence
Seven critical steps existed, but sellers were never shown the full path.
RESEARCH ARTIFACTS
From journey map to reusable pattern
These artifacts connected the system-level journey to an interaction pattern teams could consistently apply.
Procedural disclosure
A proven workflow pattern that exposes the full journey while keeping the current action focused.
Reusable guidance module
A shared component model for current actions, next steps, contextual guidance, and supporting resources.
Creating a shared model for the seller journey
Before designing screens, I established a common direction teams could design against.
01 — DEFINE
Define “new” by progress, not tenure
Use completion state to determine guidance and priority.
02 — ALIGN
Create one north star
Help every seller reach a first successful sale while understanding what comes next.
03 — SEQUENCE
Make the journey visible
Turn disconnected requirements into a sequenced path with visible progress.
04 — SCALE
Design a system teams could reuse
Create shared guidance patterns that work across Seller Central surfaces.
Design direction
Turning strategy into a connected guidance system
The strategy translated into three core experience patterns across the seller journey.
End-to-end journey
Connect discovery, onboarding, progress, incentives, and growth across the seller’s first 90 days.
Visible progress
Show what’s complete, what’s in progress, and what comes next.
Incentives in context
Connect incentives to the actions where they matter.
Trade-offs & alignment
Balancing competing priorities across seller needs, business goals, and platform constraints required deliberate cross-team trade-offs.
Visibility vs. simplicity
Tension
Each program team needed visibility, while sellers needed one clear priority.
Who
Homepage · New Seller Incentives · Perfect Launch
How we resolved it
Used the shared journey and north star to prioritize what surfaced first, while keeping secondary programs available in context.
Custom UX vs. platform consistency
Tension
A custom flow offered more flexibility, but Engineering needed a pattern that fit Seller Central architecture.
Who
Engineering · Product · UX
How we resolved it
Reused existing platform patterns and adapted procedural disclosure instead of introducing a new interaction model.
Personalization vs. scalability
Tension
Seller archetypes needed different guidance, while partner teams needed one system they could reuse.
Who
Product teams · Marketing · UX
How we resolved it
Aligned on a shared baseline journey and reusable patterns, leaving personalization to adapt guidance by seller context.
Validating whether sellers knew what to do next
We tested the experience with sellers to understand whether the new guidance model improved prioritization, progress visibility, and confidence across the journey.
Finding 01—Sellers wanted a clear path to selling
Observed
6/6 participants wanted to start adding products after registration, while recognizing that legal and banking requirements had to be completed first.
What it meant
The experience needed to connect required setup tasks to the seller’s real goal: getting their first product live.
Design change
Reframed required actions as steps toward selling rather than isolated administrative tasks.
Finding 02—Progress didn’t explain what came next
Observed
Sellers could understand that an action was complete, but completion alone didn’t clarify their position in the broader journey.
What it meant
Removing a completed task wasn’t enough feedback.
Design change
Connected completed actions to journey progress and the next recommended step.
Finding 03—Guidance needed a clear starting point
Observed
Actions and recommendations were distributed across the experience without a clear beginning or end.
What it meant
Sellers still had to determine their own priorities.
Design change
Strengthened hierarchy around the next meaningful action and connected it to the broader journey.
One journey, across multiple surfaces
The final system connected onboarding guidance, progress, incentives, education, and actions across the seller’s first 90 days.
90-Day Quickstart
Seven sequenced steps with visible progress.
Incentives tracker
Shows what sellers are eligible for, what they’ve earned, and what remains.
Shared pattern set
Reusable guidance patterns adopted across six Seller Central surfaces.
From parallel onboarding experiences to one shared system
The work aligned teams around a shared seller journey and created a reusable guidance system that scaled across six surfaces.
Shipped across six surfaces
Homepage · Incentives · Registration · Seller University · Sell.com · Email
Aligned three teams
Teams stopped building parallel onboarding experiences and worked from one journey.
Enabled self-service adoption
Marketing used the shared playbook to ship on-system assets without requiring design review.
Reduced 90-day disappearance
Fewer sellers dropped out of the journey during the first 90 days.
surfaces shipped
teams aligned
days connected
