Mini Study: Zulily
New Vendor Onboarding

Client: Zulily
Project: Vendor Portal: New Vendor Onboarding

Responsibilities: Integration requirements, Stakeholder interviews, User stories, Information architecture, Content strategy, Process & screen flows, Final designs, Design guidelines and redlines
Challenges: Disparate and paper-based documentation, limited resources, under-scoped

Results: Realizing a potential $2M in savings by implementing a a scalable, streamlined, efficient onboarding process for both domestic and international vendors.

The problem:
Zulily.com has hundreds of vendors selling thousands of products daily on its website. Before being able to sell their product, vendors are required to submit general contact information, financial information, warehouse and logistics data, product health and safety testing and compliance documentation and more.

Unfortunately, much of the onboarding process was non-standardized, localized to a laptop or paper based, and not transparent. Depending on what stage of onboarding the vendor was in and who they were in contact with, information easily became inconsistent or non-compliant. Language and communication issues presented challenges. Overall the process was presenting huge business risks, creating unnecessary communication churn, lost time to market, and frustration for vendors and Zulily vendor reps.

Discovery: Collaborative audits and interviews 

The first thing I did, with my product partner, was collect and review all of the onboarding requirements for both domestic and international vendors. We gathered electronic documents as well as spoke with internal stakeholders to capture their undocumented institutional knowledge of their role in the process. We made note of:
  • Secondary information triggers
  • Required versus optional information
  • Restricted permissions based information
  • Internal and  industry jargon and language
  • Redundancies and duplicative artifacts

Content organization and patterns 

My product partner and I began to build a questionnaire, grouped logically, divided into a sequence of steps, rewriting and iterating in order to achieve a uniform, unified voice and tone. 

I recommended we approach it as a conversation to ensure we were setting proper expectations, since the goal was to have vendors complete this process independently and with confidence. Along the way, I began to identify form-based functions and inputs.

User stories generate
role-based requirements

Based on my discovery work, I identified three main user types or roles: 
  1. Primary contact
  2. Subject matter expert (SME)
  3. System
The user types helped determine specific role-based requirements and types of access or permissions. While Primary and SME user types could overlap or be the same individual, it was necessary to ensure that they be independent (assignable) due to sensitive information handling. Additionally, since the goal was to provide vendors with an independent system, the system itself became a user type to ensure proper response and error handling.

Existing portal integration requirements

The vendor onboarding process also had to feed into the existing vendor portal, where a vendor maintained her information and product catalog. Proper access and permissions states had to be maintained, but couldn’t conflict with one another.

Information architecture &
content organization

As the onboarding questionnaire finalized, I created a high-level information architecture flow that captured each section of the questionnaire, then more minutely mapped out the process hierarchy and sequence against individual sections to ensure no overlooked content gaps or conflicting scenarios.

Process and screen flows

Since the questionnaire had to be accessible across multiple breakpoints, I started with wireframes for mobile screens, followed by desktop views. 

Ultimately the product was only implemented for desktop.

Final design and implementation

  • Sections logically grouped and ordered
  • Introductory screens set information requirement expectations, display progress, or missing information
  • Process is non-linear; vendors can navigate between sections; leave and pick up where they left off upon return
  • Persistent status and progress indicators track user inputs exist from global level to individual questions
  • Vendors can share discrete portions for others to complete; user permissions for security purposes
  • Language is friendly, industry specific; no internal jargon
  • Form design best practices, comprehensive alert and error indicators and messaging
  • Summary screens compile answers and help vendors review and edit prior to submitting