Tianyu Qiu
Amazon Buy with Prime Promotion
Role:
UX Design Lead
Product:
Buy with Prime Merchant Console
Focus Area:
UX Design, User Flow, Usability Testing, Prototype, Amazon Merchants manage/create/edit promotions and planning for promotions
Context & Challenge
Amazon’s Buy with Prime enables merchants to offer Prime benefits on their own ecommerce sites. While the core product existed, merchants lacked an intuitive interface to self-service promotion planning — resulting in high support costs and inconsistent adoption.
Key Design Questions:
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How might we enable merchants to create, edit, and manage promotions with minimal cognitive load?
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How can we increase merchant confidence, thereby reducing customer support dependency?
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What is the optimal way to visualize promotion impact on orders and returns?
Final Design
Research & Discovery
Methods Used
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Cross-functional whiteboarding with Product Management and Engineering
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Heuristic review of existing promo flows on Amazon.com and Shopify
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Sketching and early flow prototyping
Insights
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Merchants primarily need two types of promotions: sitewide discounts and product-level discounts
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Promotional features impact related pages (product catalog, order summary), revealing larger systemic effects
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Mobile management is crucial for small teams without dedicated admin staff
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These insights informed scope decisions and prioritized UI needs.
Design Strategy & Execution
Primary Goals
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Enable creation, editing, and visualization of promotions
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Integrate with existing catalog and order summary systems cleanly
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Support both desktop and mobile contexts
Core Features Delivered
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Promotion Management Flow: Intuitive create/edit workflows, with multi-level product selection
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Order Summary Visualizations: Clear display of promo effects on individual orders and returns
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Mobile Support: Full management capabilities on handheld devices, increasing shop-floor flexibility
Promotion flow
User flow - sketches
As I mapped out the flow for merchant to manage promotions, I quickly sketch out the pages based on the promotion flow. While whiteboarding and sketching ideas, I found that the other pages, such as product catalog page and order summary page may also be impacted due to the addition of promotion features, which are not included in the initial scope for promotion feature. After discussing with the Promotion PM and PMs/designers of relative parts of the platform, we decided to add those page changes to Promotion project scope.
Manage, create, edit both order/product discount promotions
Merchants need to manage product catalog for creating product discount promotion, which requires product date API from product catalog. Experience needs to be consistent with product catalog page, but with different selection features. Children products are not embedded within parent product, based on the Product Catalog page coding at the time. Worked closely with the development team to figure out how to make it work within the timeline, and also consider users' needs.
Show promotions applied on Order Summary page
Expansion of the promotion project scope, give the merchants capabilities to visualize which orders have promotions apply to them, and if there are returned orders, they can still see how much promotions have applied.
Manage promotions on mobile
Given merchant the capability to manage their promotions on the phone is very critical for small and medium size business, especially when some of them are operating with a team less than 10 people.
Validation
Usability testing
Approach
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Scenario-based tasks targeting real merchant workflows
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Focus on comprehension, flow efficiency, and error reduction
Key Findings
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Search and filter capabilities significantly improved task success
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Merchants expressed greater confidence when promotions were clearly tied to catalog inventory
Business & UX IMPACTS
After launch
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86% increase in merchants using the promo features in the first week
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Creation of 180 automated promotions
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$3.4K GMS attributed to these promos in initial week
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Higher merchant confidence reduced support overhead
Reflection & Next Step
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Plan phase 2 features: advanced SKU filtering and inventory-aware promo creation
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Extend analytic dashboards for merchants to assess promo performance over time
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Continue cross-team alignment on API improvements for scalable promo logic
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