In the fall of 2024, I was a UX Design Intern at Amazon on the Buy with Prime team at Amazon, where I designed a solution to help merchants set their preferences for Buy with Prime email notifications.


Due to confidentiality agreements, I am unable to disclose specific project details, but here is a high-level overview of my process!

If you have access, you can also view more of my process here.

Buy with Prime (BwP) allows U.S.-based Amazon Prime members to shop directly from participating online stores while enjoying the same trusted Prime shopping benefits they know and love. For shoppers, this means a familiar experience with fast, free delivery, a seamless checkout, and easy returns, even when shopping outside of Amazon. 

For merchants, this means the ability to attract and convert Prime members and other shoppers to their sites, as well as leverage Amazon’s fulfillment network on their own DTC sites for operations like inventory management, shipping, and payment processing to allow them to focus on growing their business.

Currently, merchants are unable to control any aspect of the notifications they receive, including when a notification is sent out, who the recipient is, and the content of the email. As a result, they are often overwhelmed with a high volume of emails each day, making it difficult to find the information they need or, worse, causing them to miss important updates entirely.

Additionally, merchants lack control over the shopper-facing emails sent to their customers. Since email is the primary way merchants nurture their relationships with customers, this flood of notifications can harm the customer-merchant relationship and potentially the merchant’s brand.

The goal of my project was to design a way for merchants to easily set their BwP notification preferences, with the long-term vision of scaling it to manage preferences across all services like Buy with Prime that operate outside the Amazon ecosystem.
The goal of my project was to streamline the configuration process and craft an intuitive experience that better serves the IT admins’ needs.

A key objective was to integrate BwP notifications into the existing Seller Central notification preferences page. This was part of the larger initiative to centralize more functionality within Seller Central—the main hub for Amazon third-party sellers to manage their business operations.

To understand user needs and identify best practices, I conducted the following:

I explored e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, as well as other commonly used platforms, analyzing features like notification organization, user controls, and recipient management.

Given the volume of BwP notifications, I conducted an unmoderated card sorting activity on UserTesting.com with 25 U.S.-based e-commerce business owners to understand how merchants organized different types of notifications. Participants completed two open card-sorting activities: one for merchant-facing notifications and one for shopper-facing notifications.

Both the competitive analysis and card sort informed how to structure the notifications on the page to best streamline navigation and empower our merchants with enhanced control and customization.

Based on my research, I defined the following principles to guide my design:

• Integrate BwP notifications into the existing Seller Central notification page
• Provide clear ingress points from existing BwP platforms for better discoverability
• Allow merchants to toggle optional notifications, distinguish mandatory ones, and manage recipient lists
• Use expandable and collapsible categories to handle high volume of notifications

After some exploration, I honed in on two main layouts for integrating notifications.

To validate my designs and gain more clarity on the direction, I conducted two tests.

In my final presentation to the broader Buy with Prime team, I delivered two solutions: a P0 design for immediate implementation and a future-state vision focused on scalability. The proposed designs aimed to alleviate cognitive overload, empower merchants with greater control over their notifications, and lay the foundation for a scalable system to support future Off-Amazon services.

• Since P0 includes only BwP notifications, the volume is manageable for integration into the existing Seller Central preferences page with a tabbed layout.
• Tabs clearly separate Seller Central and Off-Amazon notifications, and collapsible groups reduce visual clutter while maintaining granular control.
• Off-Amazon Services tab introduces merchants to the idea of services that operate outside the core Amazon ecosystem. When Off-Amazon notifications scale, users will already understand the concept.
• Expanding groups reveals relevant notifications, on/off states, and recipient lists. Clear checkbox states and error handling ensure merchants are informed of their notification statuses.

• A dedicated Off-Amazon Notification Preferences page, with notifications segmented by service into explicitly labeled tabs.
• Prioritizes scalability and clarity, reducing cognitive overload and enabling merchants to quickly locate and focus on relevant notifications.