Seller Onboarding Screening

Background: Prospective sellers come to Etsy with different needs based on their inventory, prior experience, and location. We lack quality data on who these sellers are, where they are within their selling journey, and their interest in receiving support or help from us to grow their business. This limits us from optimizing our growth campaigns in our core markets and catering the experience for sellers to drive more engagement.

Research insights: Many prospective sellers feel there’s a lack of guidance and limited support from Etsy on how to best get started. They’re overwhelmed by our onboarding experience, which leads with high-stakes questions regarding their shop setup (i.e., naming their shop, setting up their billing info).

Summary: We ran an A/B test for 23 days in 2022 to gauge the impact of adding screening questions to the beginning of seller onboarding on onboarding completion and shop open rate. These questions are meant to be more light-hearted, conversational prompts that motivate the seller and get them excited about opening their Etsy shop.

• Control: Sellers go through our then-current onboarding experience

• Test: Sellers see 4 screening questions before our then-current onboarding experience

Results: Test variant showed no change/neutral impact on onboarding completion and shop open rate. We ramped all 4 screening questions to 100%. This has allowed us to collect more robust data to empower our marketing campaigns (via seller lead scoring) and data analysis team, and provide a more personalized experience for each new seller.

Product design partner: Jason Ham • Product manager: Brendan Quinn

New screener questions

What I did: Wrote 4 new screener questions and led content design