Shoppable Posts
Turning Content into Commerce for Walmart
Overview
As the Principal Product Designer, I led the Shoppable Posts initiative, Walmart Creator’s first content-forward feature enabling creators to publish visual posts with direct product tagging to earn affiliate commissions . This feature bridged inspiration and purchase, driving over $78K in GMV within the first month and laying the groundwork for Walmart’s expansion into social commerce.
Role: Principal Product Designer
Skills Applied: End-to-end Product Design and Strategy, Lean UX and Rapid Prototyping, Design Systems
Platform: Mobile and Desktop Web
Team: Product Managers, Engineers, User Research, Marketing and Data
Timeframe: Q2 2024 (Beta)
Context
Walmart Creator
The MVP launch of Walmart Creator offered affiliate links and Storefronts with product collections. While Creators were excited by the reach Walmart could offer, they still lacked an expressive space in-platform to share visual, dynamic content.
Most relied on Instagram or TikTok, leading to fragmented user journeys and missed opportunties for in-app engagement.
Competitors
Creators were already asking for richer tools to tell product stories. This was one of the top feature requests in our Customer Satisfaction Survey, and competitors like Amazon and LTK had long supported content-forward experiences.
“Walmart needs better tools for creators to post content directly, kind of like what Amazon already has.”
Walmart Social Commerce
Walmart Creator was part of a broader Social Commerce initiative.
Shoppable Posts became a strategic lever within this ecosystem, generating authentic creator content to fuel Walmart’s emerging social discovery engine across storefronts, live experiences, and beyond.
Research
Both research and user quotes confirmed: shoppers responded better to authentic media from real creators.
Opportunity
Creator inspiration converts. Walmart amplifies reach.
Shoppable Posts would be the win-win giving creators the tools to publish directly within Walmart’s ecosystem, giving Walmart the authentic content it needed to fuel discovery, engagement, and growth.
A strategy built on content, commerce, and community.
Challenge
Scaling delight through mobile-first design
To unlock this opportunity, we needed to design an experience that balanced storytelling, commerce, and technical feasibility for both creators and Walmart customers.
Customer feedback also revealed a gap in usability: 90% satisfaction on Desktop, but only 66% on Mobile. This pushed us to prioritize a mobile-first experience that was intuitive, fast to publish, and easy to shop.
We also needed to align with Walmart’s internal design systems and content moderation needs without compromising creator delight or UX polish.
Objectives
Empowering Creator-Led Commerce
We set out to:
Empower creators to publish rich, shoppable content with ease, fueling their motivation and maximizing monetization.
Drive engagement and GMV by blending inspiration and commerce directly within Walmart’s ecosystem.
Build mobile-first foundations for scaling into video, livestreams, and social discovery.
Objective
From Static Pages to Shoppable Stories
Empower creators to publish dynamic, in-platform content that inspires and converts, moving beyond static links and external posts to drive Walmart’s evolution from transactional commerce to inspirational discovery.
Process
As Principal Designer, I worked closely with our PM, Engineering, Research, and Marketing teams to drive concept development and implementation.
I prioritized speed and polish, grounding early designs in competitive audits, heuristics, and rapid Figma prototyping. Post-launch, we validated the experience through creator surveys and usage data.
I led design reviews to drive alignment on layout decisions, tagging interactions, and how creators and internal teams would track the performance of posts.
Competitors
Before launching our own solution, I mapped out how competitors supported content-to-commerce experiences.
This helped frame a baseline for what user expectations we needed to meet and where we could differentiate.
It revealed friction points and inspiration opportunities across tagging, publishing, and creator flow.
Designs
First Iteration
My first design focused on replicating familiar post-creation flows.
Creators selected a photo, then added products and captions before previewing. This gave us a baseline for internal critique and early evaluation.
Second Iteration
After design critiques and system mapping, I reframed the flow around how creators actually behave.
I partnered with Product and Engineering to scope in access to Product History, knowing creators often promote items they’ve personally used.
I also refined a multi-item check pattern with dynamically updating counting button to improve clarity and ease during selection, and resized visuals to conserve mobile screen real estate—bringing selected products into view earlier to reduce confusion.
To support on-the-go creation, I advocated for and helped scope a floating action button (FAB), enabling quick post authoring from anywhere in the experience—supporting creation as the platform’s primary driver.
System Orchestration: Instant Publishing with Guardrails
Creators expect instant feedback, so I championed immediate publishing to meet that need.
To launch safely, I aligned Product, Legal, and Marketing on trust guardrails, and oversaw another designer on the strategy and design of a moderation tool that balanced speed with brand safety.
✅ Beta feedback highlighted this as a major win, with no major issues at launch:
“I like how the content is there immediately and you don’t have to wait.”
Third and Final Iteration
A big unlock was flipping the tagging flow: instead of previewing the blank post first, creators could pick products up front, then previewed and captioned. That cut down the back-and-forth and better matched how creators actually work: starting with what they’re promoting, then shaping the visuals and story around it.
I also introduced tabbed navigation of product sources for flexibility and scalability, anticipating future expansion of product source offerings.
Moving fast with a strategic and focused approach, I tackled a large scope in a short time and still made space for refinement. We added list/grid toggles and local search to improve product discovery, and I simplified layouts with lighter floating buttons to keep the focus on content.
I was excited to evolve familiar social posting patterns into a flow tailored for Walmart’s unique context, balancing familiarity with flexibility and differentiation.
This directly led to:
✅ 91% ease of tagging
✅ 82% found posting easy
✅ 100% liked visual presentation
Final Designs
I designed all Shoppable Posts surfaces, from Post Creation and Analytics to the Shopper view on Walmart.
However, the creation flow was our strategic focus, as it was the heartbeat of Walmart’s content engine. This feature was foundational in powering future patterns across social discovery and creator tools, shaping how content would scale within the Creator ecosystem.
Key decisions:
Reversed tagging flow to reduce friction and align with creator workflows.
Tabbed product sources with multi-select, dynamic counting button, and local search for flexible tagging across sources.
FAB + instant publishing, enabling quick creation and real-time visibility, supported by internal moderation tooling.
Post-Launch Design Tradeoffs:
During beta, our team noticed some images were getting cropped in the feed. I explored alternatives like dynamic cropping and adjusted aspect ratios, and mocked up options for review.
However, since the issue only affected a small number of posts and resolving it would require significant engineering effort with risk of regression, I recommended we hold.
We prioritized stability and conservation of efforts over perfection and flagged it for future iterations.
Impact
Early Results, Big Signal
We launched this as a strategic MVP beta with a trusted creator cohort to validate early hypotheses. The strong engagement and positive UX feedback gave us clear signal: creators were eager to be storytellers, not just affiliates, and content-rich shopping had the power to drive conversion.
$78.2K
in first month
88%
adoption rate
*with 90% saying they'd use it again
92%
ease of tagging
*82% ease of posting
*100% liked the visuals
Reflection
Craft, Speed, and Systems Thinking
This project sharpened how I balance speed, polish, and iteration under real-world constraints. Each design decision, from reversing the tagging flow to enabling instant publishing, was grounded in creator behavior and system scalability.
By evolving familiar social UX into something that felt tailored for Walmart’s ecosystem, I helped establish a foundation for future video and live commerce experiences. It reaffirmed that empowering creators with intuitive, performant tools doesn’t just drive engagement. It shapes platform strategy.
🔮 What’s Next: Video and Beyond
Scaling Content-Led Discovery
Creator feedback and research clearly pointed to video as the next most requested feature, seen as essential for creating more immersive and dynamic shopping experiences.
Anticipated challenges included copyright compliance and music licensing.
We slotted Video to align with Native app integration on our roadmap to expand functionality across platforms. Native integration is key not just for parity with web, but to unlock more robust, responsive, and delightful interactions, the kind of experience social discovery thrives on.
Other priority opportunities included:
Multi-surface syndication to extend spread content across Walmart product pages and site
Pinning and Drafts (mocked by descoped)
More Robust reporting flows for brand safety