Listing Migration

Product Design | Tradesy

Tradesy and Vestiaire Collective (VC) joined forces in April 2022 to become a dominant global force in luxury resale. The collective org’s leadership decided to consolidate the businesses under the VC brand and platform to position us for success.

As part of this consolidation, we had to figure out how to migrate Tradesy’s inventory and customers (buyers and sellers) to VC. We hypothesized that buyers would follow quality inventory, so our strategy prioritized migrating sellers and their items to the VC platform first.

Metrics (Migration OKR)

Objective

Become the Global Leader in Fashion Resale by Merging Tradesy and Vestiaire Collective Customers into One Platform.

Key Result 1

  • Plan: Migrate the Target # of Listings to VC in 5 months
  • Actual: Migrated 104% of Target # of Listings to VC in less than 3 months

Key Result 2

  • Plan: Complete Tradesy Soft Shutdown by End of Q4 2022
  • Actual: Completed Full Tradesy Shutdown by End of Q4 2022

Impact

Meeting our listing migration target in half the expected time frame allowed us to accelerate the complete shutdown of the Tradesy platform, saving close to seven figures in operational costs.

Solution

I was the design lead for this project, working closely with our Product and Engineering counterparts to design the user experience and inform the underlying architecture and processes to make the migration happen.

Strategy

Designing a migration experience was a complex and exciting problem to solve. We didn’t have public examples to reference that outlined how to create this kind of process, and our team had never tackled this problem before. We relied heavily on each other while leaning into our individual and collective intuitions to solve this problem together.

Because we were designing in unfamiliar territory, we set guiding principles to keep us aligned as we made decisions.

  • Make the platform do the work instead of the user
  • Ensure users have the information they need to make informed decisions

These principles kept us grounded as we aligned on the following approach:

  • Use the Tradesy platform to introduce the VC brand to users gradually.
  • Phase the process by slowly introducing migration messaging and removing platform functionality, becoming more assertive over time.
  • Lead with migration value props in initial communications and UX entry points.
  • Use friction intentionally in the migration flow to create consent gates to manage user expectations and reduce accidental migrations.

The solution also had to account for a variety of process, operational, and technical constraints, including:

  • Some listings for sale on Tradesy were not eligible to migrate to VC
  • The end-to-end listing, purchase, and fulfillment rules and processes differed between platforms (commission rates, how to ship the item to the buyer, etc.)
  • The migration process had to be opt-in
  • The UX had to support a sliding scale of automation for different user types / needs
  • Migration had to be completed on the web but needed to be executable across our iOS and Android apps as well
  • The migration had to be initiated on the Tradesy site and finished on the VC site

High-level Flow

We displayed modals on initial log-in and persistent banners in the website and apps to notify sellers that their listings were ready to migrate.

All migration calls-to-action opened the Seller Start Page on the web. This page highlighted key value propositions for migrating, managed user expectations of a quick and easy process, outlined what happens to a seller’s Tradesy listings and account post-migration, and emphasized how selling on VC’s platform differed from Tradesy.

We intentionally required initiation from this step of the flow instead of one step sooner. Migration was a destructive choice, and the two platforms had distinct operational differences. We wanted sellers to initiate the migration with all of the information they needed to understand the consequences of migrating. By introducing this frictional step, we aimed to mitigate potential support needs resulting from sellers misunderstanding the process.

Once sellers initiated migration from the start page, they were redirected to the VC site’s login view. Sellers could create a new account or log in to an existing one. Once logged in, their listings were fully migrated.

We knew this step was the riskiest moment of the flow because of the transition between platforms and account requirements to finish the process. We used consistent imagery and content cues to maintain visual continuity between the two platforms, aiming to increase confidence in the process and mitigate the drop-off risk.

We took advantage of the success view as an additional opportunity to instill confidence in the process and new platform by reaffirming the number of listings and account information migrated, communicating when sellers could expect their listings live on VC (most were instantly live), and informed sellers if some listings did not migrate because they did not meet VC’s requirements.

In the post-success view, we reiterated how selling on VC differed from Tradesy. Then, we displayed the VC Listings page where sellers could see all their migrated items actively listed on the new platform and confirm that the process worked.

Post-Migration Tradesy UX

Once migrated, sellers could no longer list new items on Tradesy. We pulled VC inventory into the Tradesy platform and displayed it prominently, using it as an additional channel to promote VC listings.

All listing functionality on the Tradesy platform was replaced with links to the same functionality on the VC platform. We used the VC badge in addition to content changes to indicate what was managed through VC post-migration. Additional Tradesy platform functionality was gradually deprecated for users when we reached the shutdown phase of the migration.

Phases

The team decided to execute a phased approach to the migration. Initial phases would introduce the VC brand to users, inform them of the merger, and allow them to sign up for the VIP Waitlist for early access to migration and other perks. This phased approach allowed us to gradually prepare users and the platform for the transition, test our core flows and assumptions, and apply learnings to subsequent phases.

  1. Announcement and Waitlist
  2. Guided (Manual)
  3. Voluntary (Automatic)
  4. Forced
  5. Final Countdown

Phase 1: Announcement and Waitlist

In this first phase, we announced that Tradesy was becoming Vestiaire Collective. We leveraged existing design system components and page templates to update the Tradesy homepage and add Migration Hub and a letter from our founder pages. This approach allowed us to ship updates to the site for each phase quickly.

The Tradesy and VC color palettes did not work well together, so we dialed back the Tradesy palette, using the monochromatic and neutral tokens for most of the site. This allowed us to introduce the VC primary orange as our accent color, establishing a visual relationship between the two brands.

We also introduced the Waitlist, which we used to gauge overall interest in the migration, test potential incentives and migration workflows for sellers, and better estimate how the migration process would need to work.

The primary value proposition of signing up for the waitlist was that waitlisted users would have their listings automatically migrated to VC. 60% of the sellers who signed up for the waitlist had 10+ listings on Tradesy. This confirmed our decision to offer an automated, simple process to migrate listings and served as a strong indicator that our target number of listings to migrate was an achievable goal. We used this information to focus our efforts in the following phases.

Phase 2: Guided (Manual)

The second migration phase focused on a select group of Tradesy sellers. We used the automatic flow’s entry and trigger points on the Tradesy site to inform users that their listings were eligible to migrate, but we had them perform the migration while on the phone with their Account Manager to make sure everything worked as expected. We didn’t want to take any chances of something going wrong and took this live support step to mitigate any risk during the subsequent phases.

Phase 3: Voluntary (Automatic)

After preparing users for the transition and testing the process, we enabled the voluntary migration phase for our users. This phase also marked the beginning of the Tradesy platform soft shutdown, as we announced that the Tradesy platform would close in early 2023.

The messaging and entry points for migration became more assertive as we switched from our “early access” to “time to move” themes. High-value placement “sell on Tradesy” calls to action in the website and apps were replaced by “move listings to VC” calls to action. The images used in migration components and pages across both platforms were updated to signal this shift visually.

Phases 4 and 5: Forced and Final Countdown

The messaging urgency and functionality deprecation increased in these last two phases leading up to the shutdown. Sellers were no longer allowed to list new items on Tradesy. Every functionality path for selling items on the Tradesy platform was repurposed as an entry point to the VC platform.

Outcome

Our migration flow was incredibly successful. We hit 100% of our OKRs significantly ahead of schedule and decided to accelerate the full shutdown of the Tradesy platform. In doing so, we saved the organization close to seven figures in operational costs. The accelerated shutdown paved the way for the Tradesy team to integrate into the VC projects and workstreams much sooner than anticipated, allowing us to start working together on new initiatives and fulfill our mission as a global organization.

Note: Working with the Tradesy team on the migration initiative is a true highlight of my career. It was an immense privilege to work with such smart, kind, and talented folks. We had so much fun tackling this problem together despite it breaking our brains a bit, and I will always look back fondly on our time together.

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