When sellers bypass your homepage entirely, the problem isn't design. It's content. Here's how I turned an abandoned screen into a daily starting point.
At a glance
The problem
The Back Office homepage was technically functional and practically invisible. Sellers had figured out their own workflows, bookmarking Orders, Insights, and Listings, and were skipping the homepage entirely. A FIDO study confirmed it: the homepage was the one screen sellers had stopped asking about, because they'd stopped expecting anything from it.
The 2022 platform migration had shipped technical parity but left a fundamental question unanswered: what should a seller actually look at when they arrive? The homepage had no answer. Before it could surface anything usefully, it needed to be worth opening.
"The homepage is rarely used by anyone. Sellers bookmark other tabs and skip the homepage entirely."
The research identified three core needs: Numbers (performance data), Notifications (time-sensitive actions), and Opportunities (growth signals), establishing Competitive Leaders (owners, CEOs, operational managers) as the primary target for homepage design decisions.
A review of comparable products (Amazon Seller Central, Shopify Analytics, Mirakl) confirmed what the FIDO data suggested. Every existing reference was either single-market or analytics-heavy with no action-orientation. There was no template to copy.
Scope & Ownership
The FIDO research established the problem clearly. What didn't exist yet was a content strategy: a considered answer to what sellers should actually see when they open the Back Office. The homepage was the gap the brief needed to fill.
I designed the full content layer of the homepage: six new content blocks, a rebuilt data architecture for Back Market's Dynamic Pricing model, and a cross-surface consistency review spanning six seller-facing surfaces.
The scope extended well beyond a single screen. As the SellerXP designer, I held design ownership across six seller-facing surfaces simultaneously (homepage, listings page, orders page, cost summary, finance report, and tooltips), each with its own engineering team, existing patterns, and prior definition of which price to display. Aligning them required sign-off from commercial and finance leads, not just a design decision. The 1,700-seller base added a structural constraint: one layout, no segmentation, serving business owners doing morning performance reviews and operational sellers clearing task queues. Designing for both meant making a deliberate call about who mattered most, and being able to defend it.
Design approach
The FIDO research gave me something more useful than a list of desired features: a mental model. Sellers who use the Back Office seriously ask the same three questions at the start of every session, in the same order. The homepage needed to answer them before the seller navigated somewhere else.
Before landing on the stacked editorial block model (developed jointly with a Content Designer, since the homepage is as much an editorial product as a functional one), three layout directions were explored. A dashboard-heavy layout with filterable charts was rejected early: it front-loaded analysis at the exact moment sellers are arriving to orient, not analyse. A notification-first feed was rejected because it surfaced urgency without context, making sellers feel something needed attention without telling them whether performance was good or bad. The editorial block model won because it separates concerns cleanly: performance first, tasks second, recommended actions last. Each block answers one question, in the order a seller naturally asks it.
One homepage. 1,700 sellers with different businesses, markets, and priorities. FIDO showed that different seller types wanted different things: Competitive Leaders wanted performance data; operationally focused sellers wanted task queues. A single static layout couldn't be optimal for both.
My decision was to design for the Competitive Leader as the primary user (the owner or manager who needs a business-wide read at the start of their day). That meant accepting the layout would underserve operationally focused sellers in the short term. The plan was to introduce presets for different user types in the next iteration, followed by full customisation. You have to earn the right to personalise. The 2024 redesign was about proving the surface was worth using at all.
The primary validation for this content strategy came from usage data. The homepage becoming the most visited page in the Back Office (above Orders, Wallet, and Insights) is the strongest evidence available that designing for the decision-maker made the surface worth using for everyone, not just the primary target.
Key decisions
FIDO identified two distinct seller types using the Back Office. Competitive Leaders (owners, CEOs, operational managers) needed a business-wide performance read every morning. Operationally focused sellers cared more about task queues: processing returns, answering messages, clearing their to-do list. A single static layout couldn't serve both equally.
Competitive Leaders are 20% of sellers but drive 40% of GMV. Each one generates twice the revenue of the average seller. When the PM pushed to design for the majority, the reframe that landed was: "We're not ignoring 80% of sellers. We're building for the users whose behaviour most directly affects platform health." Once framed as a value-per-seller argument, not a headcount argument, the direction was clear.
Competitive Leaders generate 2× the average GMV per seller. Designing for the majority means optimising for the segment with less commercial weight per decision.
The original Sales Insights block showed raw numbers: orders this month, GMV this month. Clean, minimal, and almost useless. A seller looking at €38,000 in GMV has no way of knowing whether that's good, bad, or the same as last week. A number without context isn't information; it's noise.
The homepage is not where analysis happens. It decides whether analysis is necessary. Adding filter controls and exportable charts would have turned an orientation surface into a second Insights page, undermining the one that already did that job.
Back Market's Dynamic Pricing Up model introduced an adjustment fee on top of the seller's listed price. The customer pays more; the seller's payout doesn't change. For the first time in the BO, three different numbers coexisted where one had always been sufficient.
The homepage Sales Insights block had to make a deliberate editorial call: show €280, not €302. Showing the inflated figure would have made sellers feel their revenue had grown when it hadn't. Trust, once broken on a financial surface, is hard to recover.
This decision had to be made consistently across every surface where a price appeared. Otherwise, the trust built on the homepage would be immediately undermined elsewhere.
Outcome
In Q1 2024, FIDO research confirmed what usage patterns already showed: sellers had stopped using the homepage. By Q2 2025, it had become the single most visited page in the entire Back Office. The only material change between those two data points was the redesign.
"A unified command center that helps you increase sales volume while spending less time on administrative tasks."
How Back Market described the homepage publicly at its 2025 annual seller conference. Language that maps directly to the design intent.
The redesign proved the surface was worth using. The honest gap is between proving a surface works and delivering on what it could become. Personalisation for different seller types is still on the roadmap. The redesign earned the right to the next step; the next step hasn't shipped yet.
The Back Office homepage went from the screen sellers bypassed to the surface Back Market chose to carry its most significant pricing change. The Dynamic Pricing launch required sellers to trust a new revenue figure on a surface they'd come to rely on. That's a trust signal, not a usage metric.