Amazon Influencers: Improving the experience of Connecting companies with influencers for affiliate marketing

MY ROLE: Information architecture, UX/UI design, User research, Competitive analysis, Usability Evaluation
The Amazon Influencer Program is an exclusive affiliate marketing program for content creators with a large social media presence and following. Through the program, Influencers are given a vanity URL where shoppers can browse through their curated selection of products, making it easy for customers to purchase on Amazon, in return giving the Influencer a commission on sales. As I stepped into the role as the sole designer on this project, the team was working to change the existing manual invitation process to an online application feature, finalize a friendly marketing page and improve the experience on their main product pages for the marketing promo codes used in promotions. The main objective, however, was to launch a new business tool with machine learning that allowed brands to sponsor Influencers to promote their products on Amazon through promo codes on their social media platforms, paying commissions based on detailed metrics of the results. This was a tricky landscape to navigate and my first steps were to complete a competitive analysis of existing programs, in depth analysis of recent research and review of industry reporting and FTC guidelines. The main feature design was an interface for vendors and influencers to interact with the machine learning algorithm (MLA) to match as the program grew. The first step was to redesign the sign-up flow and marketing page which were reviewed on release by Tech Crunch.

Hero alternatives for the marketing page

Influencer sign-up flow
This flow was streamlined and restructured from existing legacy forms and interface elements in order to assist Influencers through a rigid acceptance process.

InfluENCERS CAMPAIGN PROCESS

The campaign process is centered around contained information cards

USER FLOW: VENDOR

The vendors that will be involved in the Influencer campaigns are large brands that manage their business through Amazon’s Vendor Central. The site itself is a legacy property with no mobile component. The campaign set up process had a lot of variables and, considering the cognitive load and process involved, I chose to design the page using card components to avoid list or spreadsheet-like information presentations. This also kept campaigns compartmentalized through the different stages of the campaign and allowed me to create a companion process for the Influencer side.

USER FLOW: INFLUENCER

While the Amazon Associates website was more modern than the Vendor Central site, its mobile component and other subsequent updates were just starting development while my work was under way. Knowing that Influencers were incredibly tech savvy users, I worked hard to use my knowledge of their processes and platforms to inform a better experience. The complication of receiving bids, applying, being accepted or rejected, internal communications and recording of campaign activity on social media required many negotiations for a simplified user flow. In order to get some mileage out of a rigid platform, I used color sampling of the product image to create colorful banners on the Influencer campaign cards, creating differentiation of campaigns and adding some visual interest to the process.

Marketing Promo Code Issues

Once the process of creating the Influencer campaigns was complete, an examination of the end-to-end process revealed some necessary updates to existing UI. The MPC codes that were shared for the Influencer campaigns did not always work with Amazon’s search function. When following an MPC link, a customer could be presented with an error message on the Amazon.com search page due to the fact that promotional codes were being read as product names. This message consisted of two text lines, one stating that the search did not match any products and the second nondescript line containing a link to the promo page. This resulted in a high percentage of abandonment and there was no available support from Amazon’s search team. My solution was to create a set of contextual banners that used the isolated product image and large friendly text to guide the user.