Enabling our global clientele to buy the finest collectibles 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Auctions only happen a few times per day, and outside of those few hours, no buying takes place. Clients begged for the ability to shop outside of the small window, but Sotheby’s online presence was not set up in a way that allowed this to happen. So they bought our small eCommerce site (Viyet) in hopes of giving users what they desired.
After months of discussion, we ultimately made the decision to sunset Viyet and build a new eCommerce site on top of Sothebys.com. The decision, however, proved to be the right one, as we’re now selling $40M/year (4x that of Viyet).
eCommerce Backend
Payments
Buy on Behalf
Navigation
Search
Product Detail Pages
Collection Pages
Cart
Shipping Estimates
Checkout
Email Confirmations
eCommerce Backend Payments Buy on Behalf Navigation Search Product Detail Pages Collection Pages Cart Shipping Estimates Checkout Email Confirmations
Keywords
what we did (behind the scenes)
eCommerce Backend
We leveraged the pre-built Auction backend and significantly expanded its capability to accommodate eCommerce. We also integrated with Adyen (as our payment processor) and Vertex (as our tax calculator).
Shipping Microservice
A year earlier at Viyet, we launched a shipping microservice that provided users with improved shipping options. The microservice also had the added benefits of not only saving $1M/year in fees but also significantly boosting checkout conversion. We used this microservice for the new Sotheby’s checkout and worked with the business to adjust the rules to accommodate the requirements of the business and users.
User & Product Migration
Due to the complexity of adding a “guest” checkout, we unfortunately launched the MVP without it. This made it incredibly important for us to merge our Viyet user base and eliminate a potentially huge roadblock preventing users from checking out.
The Sotheby’s brand was unequivocally different than that of Viyet, and due to business demands, we could not migrate the full extent of our products. Regardless, the product migration was a multi-month project requiring expertise from across both businesses (and hundreds of Google Sheet tabs), and set ourselves up for future expansion.
Behavioral Analytics
Sotheby’s regularly pushed through our 1M free Amplitude events, and were locked out on a regular basis. I pushed for a paid plan, significantly expanded the quality of our reporting, led trainings, and became the go-to person for everything analytics.
Sunsetting Viyet
For our final farewell, we sunsetted Viyet and redirected traffic to the new eCommerce site.
what we did (user facing)
Site Navigation
We performed a series of card sorting exercises with users to determine the structure for the updated nav to ensure that it was extremely easy for users, new and old, to find exactly what they were looking for.
Merchandised Category Pages
The marketing team needed to be able to create Category pages with relevant filters and merchandise on the fly. This required collaboration across engineering, data, marketing, and product-line experts.
PDPs
Due to technical, business, and user constraints, we could not leverage the existing Auction Detail Pages (ADPs) and needed to build Product Detail Pages (PDPs) from the ground up. We refreshed our old Viyet PDP designs while taking into account Sotheby’s business requirements and the future-state vision for the ADPs to build a singular page that could eventually accommodate both.
Search Overhaul
Search needed to be overhauled to accommodate the new “Buy Now” product type (and a second “Private Sale” product type). We updated the search cards to ensure that results were easy to scan through (given their different data requirements), added filters (including the new tabs at the top and side filters), and added the expected sorting options to ensure users could easily find exactly what they were looking for.
Cart, Checkout and Order Confirms
A year earlier at Viyet, we launched a new Cart, Shipping Microservice, and Checkout. We reused our old designs as much as possible while taking into account new Sotheby’s specific business requirements, which allowed the design team to focus on more critical features. We updated the rules engine in our Shipping Microservice to accommodate the new business requirements and integrated checkout with our new payment processor (Adyen) and tax calculator (Vertex).
Results
After 9 months, we launched the Buy Now Marketplace. Two years later, we’re selling $30M/yr, 4x that of Viyet, and growing significantly month over month.