Elastic boosting — Fedor Vasiliev

What our team does

I work on the promotions and product-advertising section for Ozon sellers, helping them promote products in search results, drive more sales, and take part in special promotional campaigns. The goal is to get sellers engaged with promo mechanics and build long-term loyalty.

Problem

We currently run a set of promotions with three fixed discount tiers and three matching boosting tiers. This design gives sellers no incentive to raise their discount beyond the minimum — they set the threshold discount just to qualify, then have no reason to offer more.

Three near-identical promotions differing only by the discount they require

Research

Analytics showed that about 60% of sellers add products only to promotions that require the minimum discount needed to earn a search-ranking boost.

Analytics on seller participation across the discount tiers

Interviews and takeaways

I've prepared a guide and a set of questions for user interviews to understand how they're currently using promotions

Sellers don't understand the differences between promotions within a single campaign, which hurts the share of products enrolled

Sellers set their discount based on product margin, but are willing to increase it if a meaningfully bigger search boost is on offer (a “meaningful” boost is 15–30%)

They track promo sales through the Ozon seller dashboard analytics or third-party plugins

Adding products to different promotions is inconvenient — it means opening three separate Excel files and constantly switching between them

Hypotheses

For each hypothesis, I sketched rough designs to make it easier to discuss ideas with the manager and present them to the commercial team.

Concept 1 — interface mockup — Concept 1I combined three promotions with boosting into one so that users could participate in a single promotion and have the opportunity to set a wide range of discounts

Concept 2 — interface mockup — Concept 2When adding products to a promotion, I added a column showing the boost level. Clicking on it allows you to flexibly adjust the discount

Concept 3 — interface mockup — Concept 3I added a scale that changes depending on the discount level. The higher the discount, the greater the boost

Scoping

Together with the product manager, we reviewed the hypotheses and selected the first and third ones.

We decided not to go with the second one because that approach to pricing and discounts might be inconvenient for users and difficult to implement.

Test

After thoroughly refining the mockups, I prepared prototypes and questions for usability testing with users

Final result

In the final version, I added reference prices for each boost to make it easier for users to understand the pricing

A/B test & Impact

After completing development of the feature, we ran an A/B test on 50% of sellers and got some pretty good results

+8%Average discount amount

+2%Discount Amount

+1.6%Total Ozon GMV