BACKGROUND
In March 2025, Amazon Now launched in Bengaluru with an ambitious proposition –
better prices than the competition, and zero extra fees.
By the time Amazon entered the quick commerce market in 2025, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit formerly Grofers), Flipkart Minutes were already battling for market share. They had well established supply chains, expansive inventories, and were already a common household name. As speed and assortment reached parity across platform, price value became a key differentiator.
Post-launch, 80% of customers interviewed
felt that competitors still had better prices and offers.
Amazon entered the quick commerce game extremely late. Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit (formerly Grofers), Flipkart Minutes were already battling for market share. They had well established supply chains, expansive inventories, and were already a common household name. As speed and assortment reached parity across platform, price value became a key differentiator.
"We should improve the hero banner designs.
People will be able to understand the savings potential then. "
- Leadership
Leadership thought the banner wasn't clear enough, and wanted to focus on redesigning the messaging. The banner template had been designed to convey 3 very simple ideas - no surge fee, no handling fee, and free delivery above ₹99. But, as more propositions were added, the banner was not able to communicate them clearly. We were not sure that just improving the banner would be enough, so we decided to move fast and test it out.
The banner we launched with
High cognitive load
Not unique to Now
Contrast and accessibility issues
Too many ideas for one banner
Main cashback communication in one card
New banner layouts were designed keeping in mind that they had to be adaptable in case marketing came up with a new cashback structure. We used Attention Insight to check focus heatmaps as we designed. While this had started off as a quick-fix project, we got a feeling that we would need to dive deeper.
Focus heatmap
cashback focused banners
New banner layouts were not enough; we needed to dig deeper
While the new banners improved how the message was communicated, our hunch was correct. This was not something a simple section replacement would fix. Customers still trusted competitors more. We took this to leadership and got the go-ahead to conduct a broader study across the entire journey. That was our silver lining.
Competitors built up savings perception throughout the journey. From discovery, to cart-building, and checking out, strategies were layered carefully to make their value for money unmissable.
Hunting for answers, I sat and observed 12 customers order groceries – comparing the experience on Amazon Now to competitor apps. A number of gaps surfaced.
RECALL FACTOR
The proposition needed to be persistent
Users understood the cashback existed but not having it upfront and adequately connected to cart-building journey made it a background promise. Having it only on the storefront was not enough.
PRICE COMPARISON
Price per unit was missing
Price per unit was the comparison metric users relied on — to benchmark against their local kirana and to compare brands and pack sizes. Not showing it on Amazon Now was a significant gap, especially for new users.
DEAL BLINDNESS
Discounts did not stand out
Discount tags on almost every card became noise — customers scrolled past without registering any of them. On competitor apps, deals were impossible to miss.
SAVINGS COMMUNICATION
Savings at checkout went unnoticed
Users left checkout with no sense of what they'd saved. They searched directly for the final bill total, and missed savings communication altogether.
Savings needed to be communicated contextually – aligned with customer intent at different parts of the shopping journey.
The Interventions
Overhauling the product card
Product cards were redesigned to make savings immediately scannable — adding deal badges, strikethrough pricing, per-unit cost, and delivery time. The deal is now the first thing you read, not something you have to look for.
THE STARTING POINT
The first version of the product card that went live, got the job done, but it had it's fair share of problems and room for improvement. However, it was dearly loved by leadership, and quite a few customers said it felt 'clean'. Leadership did not really want to play around with it.
Deals on top of Discounts
The business team wanted to introduce two new discount types — 'Crazy Low Prices' and 'Prime Prices' — stacked on top of existing discounts. The constraint: keep the current card layout intact. The only available real estate was the price block at the bottom.
Ratings, Time to Delivery, and the turning point
Special deals were deprioritised after a few weeks, shifting focus to ratings and delivery time on the product card. But the exercise opened up the layout — and that flexibility became the foundation for what came next.
Scannable savings on the product card
Product cards were redesigned to make savings immediately scannable — adding deal badges, strikethrough pricing, per-unit cost, and delivery time. The deal is now the first thing you read, not something you have to look for.
Product Card (Before)
Product Card (After)
Focusing discovery on prices of daily groceries - especially fruits and vegetables
The original entry point led with a generic cashback banner. The redesign replaced it with a bottom sheet anchored in "Looowest Prices guaranteed," backed immediately by real prices on everyday staples — the items Indian shoppers already have a number in their head for.
For customers, real prices were the biggest test of value
Before
After
Increasing visibility of deals on the storefront
While Amazon Now had incredible prices which were lower than competitors, there was no dedicated section on the storefront to highlight these deals. We proposed a new section for deals discovery that would sit just under the 'Offers banner'. This could also be thematically designed for festivals and events.
There were no sections to highlight the incredible deals on the existing storefront
Renaming sections to highlight price
Another change which could be very quickly implemented but made a big impact was to rethink how each section was named. After a meeting with the marketing team, who controlled storefront section naming, we suggested a naming convention which highlighted the low cost of Amazon Now product categories.
Storefront ATF (Before)
Storefront ATF (After)
Deal-hunting on Amazon Now Search
Deal signals surface in the search dropdown and as quick filters - making value-hunting a one-tap behaviour.
Search Results with Deal filters
Improving cashback clarity across the journey with the cart progress meter
One of the biggest positive impacts to the customer experience was improving the cart progress meter, which showed how much the customer had to add to the cart to
Initial design ineffective for multi-tier cahsbacks
The existing 'Cart Bar' did not highlight multi-tier cashbacks
The initial design for the cart bar was largely based on what competitors had done already. The issue was, competitors only had to design for just the Free Delivery milestone, but we had multiple tiers of cashbacks.
The challenge was designing with limited real estate
We started our explorations by trying to indicate that further milestones were available, but soon realized that knowing exactly what those milestones were was also very important.
Helping customers discover each and every milestone
The challenge was to fit a lot of information in a small space without overwhelming the user.
We also had to decide whether the user had to take an extra action to view this information or not.
Refining the layout to reduce cognitive load
We decided to go with the second direction - keep milestones upfront. Grouping the milestones together on the left considerably reduced the cognitive load.
In testing, the design left users disappointed
We were pretty confident that the new design would work, and that users would be comfortable using it - but we were in for a shock. Customers felt that they were being more cashback than they were actually getting at the end of their orders.
Using motion to remove confusion
After some thought, some sketching and a number of bad ideas, I decided to try to solve the issue with some simple motion design. This would be a challenge on the tech team as motion guidelines had not been set up yet, but this was one constraint we had to push through.
There was a significant tech contraint as motion guidelines had not been set up yet
After further testing among Amazon employees, and positive results, this was the first version of the new cart bar that went live to all customers!
…and later we made it easier to remember the milestones
Later, we realized that business team wanted to try out different cashback levels for different user cohorts. Different marketplaces around the world also would have different offer sturctures. Amazon Fresh - which was also using our design system and components by now, had different cart milestones and offers. An effective solution was to add offer details on tapping the cart bar. This made it so that customers could view the detailed breakdown of cart milestones anywhere in the shopping journey.
Helping users achieve their milestones
A few months after the cart bar launched, leadership wanted to increase the average units per order on Amazon Now.
While customers now understood the cart milestones, figuring out what to add to reach them was still difficult. At the time, recommendations were primarily shown near checkout, but I believed it would be more effective to surface them directly from the cart bar itself.
I proposed a recommendations drawer that users could access throughout their shopping journey, making it easier to discover relevant add-ons at any time.
While the first phase was to use the recommendation component that was already available from the storefront, phase 2 explored incorporating a curation of items that helped the customer get to the next milestone with one tap, while also being highly contextual to the time of day, customer's shopping intent and preferences.
Cart Progress Indicator (before)
Cart Progress Indicator (After)
Ending on a high
On the checkout page, savings information was moved from the top — where users rarely look — to the bottom, right above "Place Order." The last thing a user sees before they buy is exactly how much they saved.
Checkout ATF (Before)
Checkout ATF (After)
When users scrolled down to view their bill summary, we also emphasized how much they had saved through discounts and cashbacks.
Checkout BTF (Before)
Checkout BTF (After)
RESULTS
'Amazon Now has gone crazy!'
