The Situation
Customers often need multiple items to complete a task, but Amazon’s shopping experience historically optimized for single-item purchases. Basket building surfaced inconsistently across the journey, requiring customers to navigate multiple pages to find accessories, services, or compatible products. This increased effort, fragmented orders, and led to missed purchases and higher return rates—especially in categories where completeness and configuration mattered.
The Strategy
I reframed basket building as a core shopping capability rather than a collection of upsell modules. The goal was to help customers confidently buy everything they need in one trip while reducing cognitive load and friction.
I led cross-functional alignment workshops to establish shared principles around automation, personalization, and customer control. These sessions grounded decisions in customer mental models and clarified when automation added value versus when it undermined trust.
Using those principles, I designed a flexible system of basket-building patterns—including configurable bundles, standalone add-on moments, and multi-bundle zones—that could scale across categories while remaining transparent and customizable.
The Result
- Established a North America basket-building vision and design framework
- Enabled configurable bundles and multi-bundle zones across categories
- Improved customers’ ability to complete purchases in a single order
- Reduced friction in complex, multi-item shopping journeys
- Lowered return risk by helping customers buy compatible, complete solutions
- Created a scalable foundation for future personalization and automation
Amara Hulslander – UX Designer 