Smart Offers

Problem
Mercari allows buyers to send an offer to sellers, who can then choose whether to accept the item or not. For some sellers, this can mean getting spammed with dozens of low-ball offers. Offers are an important piece of successful selling on the marketplace, so we needed to reduce the load on these sellers without simply turning the feature off.

Solution
We decided to create an automatic offer-response option for users who found themselves overwhelmed by these requests.

The logic would be simple: Use the minimum price selected in our Smart Pricing feature as a barometer for acceptable offers. Offers above that threshold could be accepted. Offers below it could be countered with a randomized value between the minimum and listed price.

Keeping it Simple

Since this feature would be built around the same minimum price setting as Smart Pricing, I proposed branding and bundling the "Smart Offers" functionality alongside its older counterpart.

(While we were building the new offers feature, I'd also have the opportunity to tighten the copy on Smart Pricing – making a clearer value proposition and simplifying the explanation of how the feature worked.)

Streamlining Choices

Initially, the team conceived the two functions of Smart Offers as being independent switches: One for accepting offers and one for countering low offers.

The design implementation felt finicky, though: This relatively simple feature had multiple points of decision, making it feel more complex than it was. In assessing the use cases for the feature closely, I realized that mixed-setting users would be an extreme edge case – and they wouldn't gain all that much utility anyway.

I made the case that having a single on/off switch for the entire feature would reduce cognitive load and might mean more usage as a whole.

We decided to test both versions against each other.

The result? A 65% increase in adoption on the single switch version. (Version 2 above.)