Bidder and Seller Help Resources

How can we help you?

A clear and functional resource center often gets overshadowed for the production and upgrades around the main product, yet it remains crucial for a seamless user experience. Invaluable’s consumer and business facing centers served their purpose when first created but with evolving needs and the addition of new products and services, comprehensive upgrades were ultimately needed.

The existing resource centers were run on third-party software and outdated code stacks. To improve these, the decision was made to migrate to a content management system (in this case, WordPress) so that Customer Care and Product teams would be able to access and update resources easily whenever needed.

Bidder Help Page

With a growing user base and with it a growing number of support tickets coming in through email and live chat, the biggest need for the new consumer-facing help page was the ability to easily share direct links to specific questions.

We also added a search bar to streamline the process of finding answers, not only benefiting users but also enabling the Customer Care team to analyze search terms. This insight allowed the team to identify gaps in information and adapt content accordingly.

During competitive analysis, we noticed that many help pages featured a landing page for popular questions. Following this created a great spot to house our most frequently asked questions to help alleviate some of the tickets that come in by offering easy access to common answers.

Help page for company Invaluable showing multiple FAQs — Invaluable Bidder Help page before update

Help page for company Invaluable showing popular questions and categories — Invaluable Bidder Help landing page after update

Help page for company Invaluable showing FAQs under the Getting Started category — Category page showing FAQs within the updated Invaluable Bidder Help page after update

This work aligned with the rollout of a new live chat widget, providing a great opportunity to test its implementation on WordPress during our internal review phase.

Invaluable Help page showing live chat window activated

Seller Help Center

The previous seller resource materials were implemented within the auction house portal through an iframe in a blog card style. Although this appeared more integrated to the user and kept articles password protected, the third-party software resistricted our ability to organize by topic or content type and forced us into a strict structure that didn’t suit every type of content we provided.

After looking at other companies resource centers and thinking through issues we’ve encountered, we developed a list of needs for our updated help center:

Password protection for resource materials with the same login used to access the auction house portal.
Search functionality across all content types for quick navigation.
Clearer organization with customizable pages for different content types and nesting capabilities.
User feedback functionality for individual articles to identify lacking content.

Seller resources shown on the auction house portal. — The previous seller resource center acted more as a blog with it’s style of formatting content.

Webpage showcasing new articles and products. — Top section of the landing page for the Invaluable Help Center

Webpage showing an article. — Example of an article page for the Invaluable Help Center

Webpage showing an FAQs. — Example of a FAQ page for the Invaluable Help Center

Webpage showing an examples of Private Label sites. — Example of a product specific page for the Invaluable Help Center

Webpage showing an videos. — Example of a video page for the Invaluable Help Center

Most of these needs for the new help center were met through the WordPress theme chosen with the password protection aspect completed in partnership with our DevOps team. Since we only had two products at the time, we organized our materials by content type and began populating the site.

After the build was complete and approved, we launched the site with a selection of materials to announce the new resource center. Along with noting the type of topics to expect, we made sure to mention that no new login credentials would be required to ease their transition.

Image announcing new Help Center — Opening image shown after login to the auction house portal.

Invaluable Help Center announcement email — Announcement email sent to auction house clients.

As Invaluable’s product suite expanded and it became more likely for a user to not have the full line of products, the navigation was reorganized to be grouped by product instead of resource type.