Product discoverability in the digital marketplace

AppSumo runs a digital marketplace for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and side hustlers who want great tools at low prices.

This is the story of me helping those people find what they’re looking for.

A little background

As stated above, AppSumo hosts a digital marketplace for entrepreneurs. Their customers live for a good lifetime deal (LTD).

In the past, they’ve helped launch products like DropBox, MailChimp, and Evernote.

The problem

By the end of 2021 AppSumo had too many products for sale and not enough customers to buy them.

Huge effort had been put into partner (seller) growth, with a focus on building out the self-listing flow so partners could get their products online easier.

Partner growth outpaced customer growth, and there was mounting concern over product quality and value. Meanwhile, partners weren’t seeing the cash they expected from listing their products on the marketplace.

So, how might we help customers find the right product for their needs?

Based on google analytics and customer surveys, we came up with three areas where we were really not providing the best customer experience.

Backwards navigation

Over half our users land on a product detail page from an outside link, and there is no easy way for them to move around the site once they’re there. No way to discover similar or related products.

Categories

Many users are unsure of the best products for their business, and it’s difficult to discover new ones. On the browse page, we had one layer of 23 filterable categories that were both too broad and non-exhaustive.

Search

Search results are confusing and don’t show related or expected products. There was no logic for near-matches, and expired deals didn’t show up at all.

Learn

How do others do it?

What lessons should we take from these?

  • Several layers of categories, intuitive flow from broad to specific

  • “Mega menu” accessible at top of every page on the site

  • Side nav within browse to provide context and further browsing options

Learn

Brainstorm time

Who better to help us brainstorm potential product org structures than the team who sources the products on our marketplace? We got the business development team together for a short workshop.

Their homework: bring to the workshop 10-15 products they recently sourced.

Individual task: come up with a structure to house your set of products. Get creative!

Group activity: share ideas and synthesize a few high-level product organization structures.

Ideate

Draft it, baby

After learning about common taxonomy structures and getting some inspiration and background from the business development team, I started drafting a new structure.

I iterated these based on interviews and feedback from AppSumo teammates across the business.

More research

Q: Can people find what they think they’re going to find based on the categories presented?

I ran card sorts and tree tests with end users to gauge how well we were organizing our categories.

Here are some sample tree test prompts [and the correct subcategory we wanted them to land on]

  1. Your business has seen a lot of growth over the past few months but you're in need of a tool to help you manage all of your new fully-remote employees. Show us where you’d find that tool. [Remote collaboration]

  2. As an owner of a small, online store you're in need of a tool that will allow for more direct communication with your customers when they have issues with your products. [Customer support]

  3. Your small brick-and-mortar store is doing well, but you feel that you could drastically boost your sales if you could expand your online reach through social platforms. [Social media]

  4. Over the past six months you’ve been building out your side hustle, but you in order to make the jump to full-time, you need to grow your client-base. [Lead generation]

  5. As a freelance digital content creator, it’s important to protect your work and ensure you’re compensated for any reuse. [Intellectual property management]

  6. Your independent design agency is growing with repeated successes, but with all this new business you’re struggling to keep to estimated timelines and budgets. [Financial tracking & planning]

  7. Your retail business is picking up steam, and you want to build a mobile app to help boost reach and sales. However, you don’t have any coding knowledge, or the budget to hire a developer. [No Code]

  8. Your team needs to validate the functionality of a new feature of your mobile e-commerce app before you launch it to your full customer base. [Usability testing]

Refine

After testing and feedback (and many, many versions) we landed on a new taxonomy that included:

Four product groups

  • Software (shown below)

  • Courses & learning

  • Templates

  • Creative resources

Four levels of hierarchy

  • Group

  • Category

  • Subcategory

  • Backend tag

Build

UI

Existing

New

Main nav

Mega menu

Browse

Existing

New

Refine

Usability testing

Once we had a prototype built, we ran moderated and unmoderated tests with existing customers as well as people who had never heard of AppSumo.

We found we needed even stronger emphasis on current location (category) in the flow, as well as more options for backward navigation to allow for varied user behavior and expectations.

Results

The first phase released in July 2022. This included the new site header with product types and product-finding CTA.

We saw an immediate improvement in overall conversion of 11.89%

Projected annual sales impact:

$14 Million

Further phases, including mega menu, side nav, breadcrumbs, and landing page redesign, are still in development.

Next
Next

Upsell: food delivery app