It began with a vision to be the best Auction App of All Time.
We asked our users what they needed and built a new auction platform that gave them reasons to stick around (and spend a few billion per year).
The relaunch (and years of additional work) resulted in significant increases in Downloads, MAU, Stickiness, Retention, Bidding/Browsing Activity, etc. Even with less than 5% of the total user base, the app became the #1 source of bidding activity at Sotheby’s, and the most important product in the company.
CodePush
Sentry
Personalization
Stream
Notifications
Onboarding
CMS
A/B Testing
CodePush Sentry Personalization Stream Notifications Onboarding CMS A/B Testing
Keywords
what we did (behind the scenes)
Sentry
The app suffered from an unacceptable number of crashes/bugs, however, the team had relatively no insight into where and why due to issues with our old bug reporting tool, Bugsnag. We swapped Bugsnag with Sentry, which gave us us the ability to significantly reduce the crash rate and be proactive rather than reactive.
CodePush
The app regularly took between 4 to 10 seconds to open, which was especially frustrating given the time-sensitive nature of the product. This was the result of the app checking for CodePush updates on the Splash screen. We reduced the load time to ~2.5 seconds by moving CodePush updates to the background.
A/B Testing
We added Optimizely to the app to enable A/B testing (and were the first team at Sotheby’s to do so).
what we did (user facing)
Onboarding
We introduced a new onboarding flow and asked users what type of art & objects they were interested in collecting. Turns out they’re interested in a lot.
We used this data to personalize their entire experience, which significantly boosted retention, stickiness, items viewed, biding activity, and more.
Notifications
Our users didn’t want to work to find out when we had new art and objects in line with their interests. So we started alerting them on Fridays, which increased Friday DAU by 12% and average items viewed by 8%.
Personalization
We made it easy for users to browse through the latest and greatest by creating personalized feeds based on their interests and bidding/browsing activity. 67% of users interacted with these features, resulting in significant increases in bidding activity and session length.
My bids
Users complained that it was too cumbersome to find their active bids (which they needed front and center), so we put them front and center and reduced the time required to bid by 13%.
Auction Calendar
We reintroduced the Auction Calendar with larger imagery, auction details based on the user’s geolocation, and filters. No need to leave the screen. Dropoff decreased by 33%.
CMS Powered Browse
Marketing needed a better way to promote content, so we created flexible components that could be easily managed by their teams. Browse by Topic, our first A/B test, increased the Average Number of Items Viewed per User by 17%.
Auction Updates
Users complained that it was obnoxious to leave an Auction Detail Page to find items they had bid on or saved within that auction. We agreed, and users rewarded us with increased ADP conversion.
Collections
Users needed an easy way to browse through their saved objects & auctions, which was notoriously difficult in the previous app. We created a new tab and added filters which made it incredibly easy to find the most important content based on priority.
Result
After two years, the app transitioned from a frankensteined afterthought to the most important product at the company. We saw a 73% increase in downloads and significant increases in our most important metrics (%MAU Bidding and Average Bids per Bidder). Even with less than 5% of the Sotheby’s user base, we became the #1 source of online bidding activity in the company and an app to be proud of.
“This is the beset app of all auction houses.”
“Your app is vastly improved.”
“It’s exactly what I need!”