Combined Shipping

eBay

The combined shipping process on eBay has long been a manual and confusing experience, accessible mainly to seasoned users, while newer buyers struggle to navigate it. Although sellers often mention combined shipping in their listing headlines to get around this, the process itself remains ambiguous and inefficient, creating unnecessary friction. By enhancing and streamlining this experience, eBay has a major opportunity to drive adoption, improve user satisfaction, and unlock significant revenue growth.

Overview

As the lead designer for Combined Shipping, I partnered closely with the Sr. Design Manager for Unpaid Items (UPI) to bring a renewed, streamlined combined shipping experience to eBay. With resourcing constraints and team turnover, I led a rotating tiger team of 2-3 designers and 5 content partners, ensuring continuity and strategic execution across buyer and seller experiences.

Stakeholders

  • Chief Product Officer

  • VP Payments

  • VP Design

  • Sr. Director, Trust

  • Sr. Design Director, Financial Services & Trust

  • Sr. Director, Design Program Management

  • Director of Product Management

  • Cross-functional leadership groups

Key outcomes

  • TBD

Business problem
Auctions contributed to about 45% of eBay’s overall unpaid item (UPI) issues—and a surprising 40% of that came from a lesser-known feature called combined shipping. This feature lets buyers ask a seller to ship multiple items together to save on shipping costs, but it wasn’t super visible or easy to use.

To help reduce UPIs, eBay previously introduced a one-hour auto-charge experience auctions, which definitely made a dent. But it came with an unintended side effect: it made it harder for sellers to offer combined shipping, so many of them opted out of the auto-charge experience altogether. That left around 3.9 million users more exposed to the risk of unpaid items.

User problem
Users are running into trouble when trying to request combined shipping—it’s a pretty hidden and unintuitive feature, especially with the 1-hour autopay flow in place. As a result, the experience feels frustrating and clunky. Not only does that hurt the buyer journey, but it also leads to less combined shipping GMV for both eBay and its sellers. In some cases, buyers are even choosing to shop elsewhere because of it.

Desired outcomes

  1. Improve the core auctions experience

  2. Expand the foundation to support combined shipping at scale

By introducing a standardized shopping window for combined shipping, this would provide both buyers and sellers a more consistent and predictable shopping experience. This window would still include an autocharge mechanism to help prevent unpaid items, but striking the right balance between reducing friction and maintaining safeguards against risk.

O N E

Creating a new foundation

Foundational journey mapping

To start untangling the complexity of the experience, I teamed up with the Senior Design Manager for UPI to map out the ideal end-to-end journey.

  • Auctions foundation: introducing shopping intent capture to the core eBay auctions experience

  • Combined shipping: transaction scaling through the elongated shopping window

This was a crucial first step in helping us align stakeholders, cross-functional teams, and various domain leaders around a shared vision of what the experience should look like. Additionally, this enabled multiple engineerings teams across the organization to begin initial sizing.

Concept exploration: Shopping intent

Our proposed experience was dounded

I explored optimization opportunities across the entire E2E journey

After initial alignment, began exploring key screens

Advocating for holistic messaging

As explorations evolved, I brought in our product marketing partners early to align on messaging and support the rebranding of Jira Service Desk to Jira Service Management. While my main focus was the in-product experience, I also took the opportunity to educate my team and cross-functional partners on holistic user messaging—ensuring a seamless experience that fosters ongoing engagement.

I crafted a POV of new messaging triggers.

With new messaging needs, I also identified notifications that need to be updated.

T W O

Exploring the architecture

Cross-product alignment hurdles

The biggest challenge was reconciling the differences in subscription models—JSM allows up to three free users, while Confluence includes 10 seats. My product partners aimed to use feature gates within JSM to drive Confluence upgrades, which was feasible but carried a high risk of user drop-off due to forced paywalls.

From my initial explorations, I advocated for consistent transition messaging, emphasizing that every ingress into a paywall scenario should assessed and revised as needed to ensure the experience was as frictionless as possible. In order to gain cross-functional and leadership alignment, I executed across three levels of fidelity to navigate the complexities of this pivot.

1) Cross-product user flows

With numerous infrastructure dependencies and parallel team efforts, I created a detailed flow diagram mapping out every decision point in the user experience. The goal was to highlight the complexity we were inheriting and ensure we addressed technical dependencies upfront to prevent roadblocks in development.

Outcome
This visual guide brought clarity around team ownership of specific product areas, ultimately helping to facilitate discussions with engineering and product leads. Using these flows, my PM and I were able to influence the roadmap with unlicensed access—an architectural change that allows users to engage with embedded features without restrictive licensing barriers to the users, and preserving the integrity of Atlassian’s proven revenue model.

Exploring all “cross-flow” touch points

Journey mapping across all user segments

2) Persona mapping

To illustrate the potential impact of these structural changes from a user’s perspective, I mapped one of Confluence’s user personas new experience.

Outcome
By showcasing the progressive value for agents without relying on forced technical barriers, we successfully demonstrated how a seamless experience could drive adoption and engagement.This helped secure further alignment with leadership team, reinforcing the necessity of these changes for an effective design.

Overview of persona mapping across Confluence and JSM.

Exploration of funneling cross-product access requests.

3) Qualitative user research

Finally, I designed a high-fidelity prototype for our UXR partners to conduct qualitative user testing and evaluate how the embedded experience would impact knowledge bases.

Outcome
The majority of users responded positively to our solution, and interestingly, they did not share many of the concerns our team initially anticipated.

  • They experienced overall less cognitive load from context switching

  • High-perceived value from a streamlined workflow

  • All were delighted by the new access point and familiar embedded experience

  • Admins were delighted by the streamlined licensing

  • All users were adverse to forced pay gates to access what’s presented as a standard feature

  • All users mentioned the criticality of messaging

T H R E E

Delivering impact across Atlassian

Ecosystem-wide influence

Our work quickly caught the attention of teams across the Confluence product and the broader Atlassian ecosystem. This system-wide effort underscored the importance of our cross-functional partnerships, which were essential to the success of all experiences across Atlassian’s suite and third-party offerings.

More than components—an entire framework

To drive adoption and scalability, I approached Embeddable Pages as a platform rather than a single-product feature. After partnering with JSM and implementing our components, I began developing guidelines to support future integrations, ensuring consistency and efficiency in upcoming partnerships.

The final experience

Cross-functional and platform teams involved

Content Experience, Confluence: Porting the editor and read experiences

Disco, Confluence: Navigation changes, parity in IA, cross-flow across products

Onboarding, Confluence: Transition experience across products, customized spaces

Tailored Experiences, Confluence: Templates and unique identifiers

Permissions, Confluence: Enabling unlicensed user access outside of the product

Product Integrations, Confluence: Scaling to products outside of Atlassian—MS teams, Zoom, Google, Slack, etc.

Growth, Buyer Experience: Silent bundling Confluence + [Parent product]

Growth, Essentials: Add-on experience post-subscribe, domain services

Growth, Multipliers: Jira Software – Project Pages powered by Confluence

Growth, Mandalorians: Trello — Enhanced collaboration and task management power by Confluence

Teamwork Platform, Design System: Responsive editing experience within an embedded environment