Product case · 10 / 13
A marketplace that had to sell what it had
Product note. Organizations, dates, private data and implementation details are omitted.
The problem and the decisions
At Office Depot I worked on the marketplace side of the business: what gets listed, at what price, how much of it exists, and how fast it moves. Daily marketplace revenue grew roughly threefold over that period.
The lever was almost never a bigger catalogue. It was the relationship between three numbers that usually live in three different teams, price, available stock and how fast it sells, and what happens when they disagree.
A listing that ranks well and cannot ship is worse than no listing: it spends the attention and returns a cancellation. Most of the work was making those three numbers visible to the same person at the same moment.
What it was built with
What I did
What I learned
In commerce the product is not the page, it is the promise that the thing exists. Everything upstream of that is decoration.