Turning campaign complexity into clearer decisions

Growth depended on a choice

On Shopee, sellers join platform marketing campaigns by nominating products for specific promotional sessions. For high-volume Indonesian sellers, the choice needs to fit the products they want to promote and the dates they plan to sell.

Shopee and its Business Development (BD) teams want sellers to participate in strategic campaigns. Sellers want exposure that can turn into sales, but need to choose a promotion that suits their products, timing and commercial goals. The product needed to connect those goals at the moment a seller decided where to participate.

BD was filling the gaps

I partnered with the local BD team on contextual interviews and observed how sellers chose campaigns. They repeatedly scrolled, compared options, and waited for BD recommendations before deciding where to start.

The list made campaigns look equally important. Sellers could see what was available, but had little help deciding what deserved their attention. The project presentation recorded BD spending 40% of its time helping sellers upload campaign products. Self-service was an operational problem as well as a usability problem.

I reframed the problem around the decision sellers were trying to make. A clearer starting point could help them engage with platform priorities; a way to narrow the options could help them judge whether those priorities suited their own plans.

Balance speed with seller fit

The product team favored keeping the existing platform ranking: it was quicker to ship and carried less change. From the design side, I pushed for time to check whether that approach would resolve the difficulty sellers were actually having.

I helped turn that disagreement into a question we could test: how much guidance did the platform need to provide, and what did sellers still need to decide for themselves? The team’s MVP direction retained a shared structure while making room to address seller relevance.

Platform-led priority

Value

A common ranking makes strategic campaigns easier to recognize and gives BD a consistent starting point for guidance. I explored ranking cues and a gallery highlighting six campaigns as ways to make that priority visible.

Tradeoff

A platform-wide order cannot describe what is most relevant to every seller. Experienced sellers still need to judge whether a campaign fits their promotion plans.

Seller-relevant ranking

Value

A personalized ranking direction could make the order more relevant to sellers’ growth objectives and promotion plans.

Tradeoff

The earlier exploration raised concerns about complexity and a less standardized experience. I needed to understand which seller preferences should be explicit controls, rather than assume that ordering alone would solve the problem.

The concepts included type-and-date filters, a top-six gallery and a more relevant ranked list. I compared them through usability, business needs and feasibility, then used seller testing to understand what ranking alone still left unresolved.

Ranking was only the start

I explored design directions and designed the full usability study. I prepared the testing materials and shared them with the Indonesian BD team, then worked with them to conduct sessions with 10 high-volume sellers.

The sessions showed that clearer ranking helped, but sellers still scrolled through many options before reaching a choice.

Turn feedback into design direction

I worked with the team to group the testing findings into themes. Together, we connected sellers’ feedback to three needs: relevant promotion types, campaign dates and clearer priorities.

Grouping usability-testing findings with the Shopee team.

Put each goal at the right step

The decision spans both sides

Seller-facing filters also depend on how campaigns are maintained. Campaign managers define tiers and mechanic labels, and product sessions reference those labels so the seller-facing choices stay connected to operational configuration.

The campaign-management design makes this relationship explicit: campaign priority belongs to the campaign, while the promotion label belongs to the sessions sellers can select. That provides a shared structure for platform priorities and seller choice, rather than requiring the seller-facing list to carry every operational decision.

My role connected different kinds of input. Local BD brought the context behind sellers’ choices and helped facilitate testing. I translated that evidence into the ranking and filtering decisions. Once the interaction model stabilized, I worked with engineering on A/B validation of the combined experience.

In the related design-system work, I also partnered with a visual designer and developers to standardize B2B patterns for Seller Centre’s adaptation across 11 markets. A shared interaction structure could stay consistent while labels and local context changed.

Participation rose as support work fell

The original presentation reports improvement across three parts of the experience: more successful seller participation, higher campaign engagement and less manual support work. Together, they connect the design to both seller action and operational capacity.

Seller participation success increased from 45% to 86%, a gain of 41 percentage points. Campaign CTR rose from 5% to 9.5%, a 90% relative increase. The presentation also records 70% less manual work and 4,480 hours saved per year.

The business value was a more scalable path into campaigns: sellers could make more of the decision within Seller Centre, while BD spent less effort on manual participation support. Improved campaign participation creates opportunities for exposure and sales; the available results do not quantify revenue or profit growth.

The result reinforces the product decision: give the platform and seller different responsibilities within one flow. Platform priority provides direction; sellers bring promotion preferences and timing. I would next track time to an eligible nomination and downstream campaign sales to understand how this change translates into seller returns.

Carry the choice into action