Through customer research conducted in December 2018, we were able to validate a long-running hypothesis; that Tradesy’s supply is overpriced. In order to offset our overpriced supply, we increased our coupon budget spend and put our peer-to-peer supply on sales and promotions as a band aid solution. We saw a 9.1% lift in daily GMV (YoY) in January 2019 and a 6.4% lift the following month.

Realizing that this coupon strategy isn’t a long term solution, we want our supply to be well-priced enough for buyers to purchase quickly. We want these great prices to drive urgency in lieu of sales and promotions to wean our users off of discounts as a driver of conversion.

Using pricing data and recommendations created by a separate team, we will surface messaging for items that Tradesy considers ideal for a listed item to sell. We want to increase conversion for product pages by 10% when an item has this specific messaging.

The design team held a 1-day design sprint to establish a shared vocabulary for ‘Market Price’ to create consistency for our users and how that will be represented throughout the user experience. My role was the facilitator for the sprint and I led the team through competitor audit, stakeholder interviews, journey mapping, and sketching sessions. We arrived at the solution to create 3 pricing tiers accompanied by price badges.

Working with our copywriter, we finalized the language of how we would be communicating each pricing tier. The visuals of each tier took multiple rounds of iterations. The term ‘Market Price’ refers to the current price this item is available for in the marketplace.

We released this badging system in phases through a/b testing. The first tier being “Market Price” was released first to see if it can drive conversion higher than our sale badging. We initially saw a small 3% lift in conversion and released the second tier “Below Market Price”. We are currently waiting for this test to reach statistical significance.

Here are the latest designs for the market price badges.