One returns tool for 9,000+ sellers who each had their own process

Returns at ManoMano were resolved by direct messaging between seller and customer, and customer NPS fell as the message count rose. I designed the centralised flow that replaced it.

Role : Product designer

Team : 1 Product managers, 4 Engineers, 1 User research

ManoMano, 2024

Back office

E-commerce

One returns tool for 9,000+ sellers who each had their own process

Returns at ManoMano were resolved by direct messaging between seller and customer, and customer NPS fell as the message count rose. I designed the centralised flow that replaced it.

Challenge

Sellers had no way to centralise or standardise their return requests. The process was manual, and it ran on messages.

Context

With over 9,000+ sellers on the marketplace, each qualified and managed returns through their own internal process, which made standardisation the core challenge rather than a detail of it. Sellers resolved returns by exchanging messages directly with customers, and I saw customer NPS drop in correlation with the number of messages exchanged. High return fees added a second layer of dissatisfaction on top.

Design principles

Qualitative research

Interviewed business users to understand their internal processes and evaluated the existing MVP.

Design principles

Flow mapping

I mapped the interaction between customers, sellers and the internal organisation across the full return lifecycle. This surfaced where delays accumulated and exposed use cases I would otherwise have missed.

UI/UX

Iterating and shipping improvements across different product initiatives which impact both buyers and business users.

Qualitative research

I interviewed 20 sellers over Zoom, from small to large organisations, screening deliberately for a specific panel: no API integration and no fulfilment programme, the sellers with the least tooling and therefore the most manual process. The finding that redirected the work: the existing MVP wasn’t adaptive to how sellers actually worked, and onboarding into it was missing.