Amanda Schmutzler
Rebuilding Walmart Marketplace's Brand Permissions System
A self-serve model letting brand owners bring sub-brands and outside agencies into their brand hierarchy and grant scoped content ownership, as an acting brand owner or an authorized reseller, spanning Brand Portal and Seller Center.
- Problem: brand owners had no self-serve way to nominate sub-brands or agencies into their brand hierarchy and grant them content ownership.
- Users: brand owners managing their own Seller ID hierarchy, and Walmart's internal seller-support team who'd been fielding the escalations a self-serve flow could prevent.
- Approach: two scoped roles and a self-serve request flow, unified across Brand Portal and Seller Center.
- Process: benchmarked Amazon's Brand Registry, mapped the existing flow, then iterated with engineering.
- Impact: enabled management of 5.7M branded products and $250M in incremental brand GMV.
Where resellers stood before this redesign
A snapshot of authorized-reseller registration before the redesign, and the gap self-serve access was meant to close.
708Brands with an authorized reseller
Each sent an authorization letter.
28.4%Registered in Brand Portal
201 of the 708 brands.
117Sellers with a 3P owner/Partner ID
The sellers behind those brands.
103Still active today
Of those 117 sellers.
4.2MItems with a brand owner or reseller
Of hundreds of millions of items.
76.5%Content quality for brand owners
Compared with 71.2% for other sellers.
10M items
77%
$50MWhat the system enables
Brand Portfolio replaced an ad hoc, request-by-request process with a self-serve, auditable roles model.
It consolidated two
disconnected processes
into one system.
Brand owners went from no formal concept of a “brand team” to full visibility into who had access and why.
Partnering with product and engineering
Staged hand-off
Interactive prototypes first, then detailed, annotated Figma mockups.
Scoping roles together
What could realistically be a role versus a one-off permission, and how approval state is tracked and audited.
Past hand-off
Working through edge cases and conflicting requests together with product, so engineering didn’t have to guess.
Testing the designs with users
Heuristic evaluation
I partnered with the research team on a heuristic evaluation, reviewing the designs against established usability principles to catch issues early, before they ever reached users.
User research
Next came testing the designs with users, watching how they worked through key tasks, then refining them into a clear, intuitive, easy-to-use experience for brand owners and sellers.
A few decisions worth explaining
Why two request paths, not one
A brand owner can grant access directly, or a seller can request it. Both paths share the same roles, so they behave identically and there is one model to test and support.
Why “needs more information” exists
With only approve or deny, an incomplete application gets treated like a bad one. A third state lets the seller pick up where they left off.
Why the platforms stayed separate
Brand owners look after a brand over years. Sellers need to know where things stand today. Each product shows what its user needs, on the same roles.
Why registration status needed five states
A trademark never verified and one under dispute aren’t the same problem. On hold and suspended keep them distinct, so everyone knows what happened and what’s next.
What changed day to day
Brand Portfolio rolled out in phases, starting with the core ownership-and-access flow.
In usability testing, sellers finished verification and access requests in a fraction of the time the old process took.
Self-serve status cut “what’s happening with my request” tickets during rollout.
Brand owner enrollment outpaced rollout targets in the first full quarter.
Brand Portal home page
Where a brand owner lands first, and the way into Brand Portfolio and its permissions.
Everything at a glance
Claims, trademarks, brands, and people, each one click away.
A claims summary
A chart of claims by type, brand, or person, with filters.
Next steps for the brand
Links to Seller Center, Walmart Connect, and how-to guides.
What a brand owner checks first, including claims in progress, trademarks, brands, and people, before drilling into any one area.
Brand Portal overview video
A walkthrough of Brand Portal from the Walmart Marketplace team.
Official overview via Walmart Marketplace's YouTube channel.
Flows
Ownership, access roles, and permission changes traced across the full seller journey.
Design ideation
Using Figma, I explored interface concepts for verifying ownership, assigning roles, and managing listings — iterating with engineering and the broader Marketplace design system team before final designs moved into build.
Ownership verificationConfirming a seller's claim to a brand before any access could be given out.
Role assignmentTurning acting brand owner and authorized reseller into scoped roles.
Listing managementKeeping everyday brand and listing controls simple once access was set.
My Role
The old permissions setup wasn’t holding up. I set the design direction for a role-based system, then got engineering, the design system team, and seller support to agree on one approach.
What shipped was a self-serve permissions model unified across Brand Portal and Seller Center, part of the work behind $250M in incremental brand GMV across 5.7M branded products.
Seller Center and Brand Portal, the two products I designed for
What I brought to this project
Design direction
Defined a role-based permissions system across both platforms.
Cross-functional work
Partnered with engineering, design systems, seller support, and research.
Competitive research
Benchmarked Amazon’s Brand Registry to identify the gap.
The Challenge
Third-party brand owners were a critical, fast-growing part of Walmart's Marketplace business, but they had no way to manage the sub-brands and Seller IDs inside their own portfolio.
No way to nominate sub-brands into their brand hierarchy.
No visibility into requests to join that hierarchy.
No way to gauge performance holistically across their portfolio.
Sub-brands often ran as independent businesses with their own Seller IDs, so sellers couldn't get the content ownership and features they needed to grow.
I led the redesign of that permissions system across its two connected surfaces: Brand Portfolio, inside Brand Portal, where a brand owner manages access directly, and Brand Manager, inside Walmart Seller Center, where a seller can request that access themselves.
The hard part wasn't any single screen. It was one coherent permissions model that had to work for brand owners, their teams, outside agencies, and Walmart's own trust-and-safety requirements, across two separate products with two different audiences.
Understanding the Project
Brand relationships and management rights
A company can own multiple brands, and each brand can contain child brands of its own. The Brand Portal needed to represent that nesting while keeping three things distinct: brand ownership, hierarchy management, and user permissions.
The rules
A child brand can also be a parent, managing its own descendants but not another branch.
A child brand belongs to only one parent at a time.
Reporter roles aren’t copied between parent and child brands.
One person can be both a brand owner and an authorized reseller, without two accounts.
Brand structures it had to support
Branded house. Everything under one name.
Endorsed brands. A parent backs a brand that keeps its own look.
Shared master brand. The parent name across every unit.
House of brands. Each brand has an independent presence.
Hybrid. A mix under one parent.
Two platforms, two audiences
- Brand Portal — where a brand owner registers trademarks, verifies ownership, and manages brand access. This is where Brand Portfolio lives.
- Seller Center — where sellers manage listings, orders, fulfillment, and performance. This is where Brand Manager lives.
Brand Manager — a seller applies for brand privileges, as acting brand owner or authorized reseller.
Brand Portfolio — the brand owner reviews the request and can approve, deny, or ask for more information.
A seller applies in Seller Center, and the brand owner approves it in Brand Portal. Or the brand owner adds the seller directly in Brand Portal.
Where sellers got stuck
Before this project, Brand Portal had no way for a brand owner to nominate sub-brands or outside Seller IDs into their brand hierarchy. There was no way to see who was requesting to join, to grant content ownership directly, or to track who had access to what.
01 · Requesting accessSellers had no self-serve way to prove brand ownership or request elevated privileges; everything ran through manual channels.
02 · Managing the teamOnce approved, there was no clean way to extend specific, scoped permissions to teammates or an outside agency.
03 · Growing the listingMarketing tools and richer content stayed out of reach until access was sorted out, stalling a brand's growth on the platform.
Why roles, not just access levels
I first explored a more granular model, with individual toggles for content editing, advertising, and listing management. I rejected it because it pushed the complexity back onto brand owners. I settled on two fixed roles, so owners could hand off work without handing over the whole account.
Acting brand ownerFull content and advertising rights, for a trusted teammate managing the account day-to-day and making the same calls the brand owner would.
Authorized resellerScoped content and listing rights for an outside agency, with no access to core account settings like payments or account ownership.Every request has a status the seller can see
What I learned from Amazon's Brand Registry
Amazon's Brand Registry was the closest thing to what I needed. I went through it myself and compared it to Walmart's flow, looking at how ownership gets verified, how roles get handed out, and how long it takes a seller to make a first edit.
Seller Central, Build Your Brand
Brand Registry, protect and monitor
Seller Central, user permissions
What I took from it
Simpler UI
Sellers self-serve, with no support ticket.
Enhanced user management
Clear, named roles scoped to real needs.
Improved access control
Auditable access, not one shared login.
Competitive positioning
Closing the gap with Amazon's team access.
The Claims list, before and after
The same landing page sellers and brand owners live in day to day — flat and sparse before, now surfacing Express Counterfeit Removal, at-a-glance status counts, and real filtering.
Before
Claim status, type, and brand were all there — just crammed into one dense, outdated table.
After
Submitted, in-progress, and closed counts up top; claim status, type, and brand all filterable from the table itself.
Solutions at a glance
Simpler UIA redesigned permissions flow sellers could self-serve, with no support ticket or waiting on a rep.
Enhanced user managementClear, named roles like acting brand owner and authorized reseller, each scoped to real needs.
Improved access controlTighter, auditable permissioning across a team, not one shared login everyone used.
Competitive positioningGiving Brand Portfolio its own team-based access model, closing the gap with other marketplaces.
Brand Portfolio
Selected screens from the Brand Portfolio experience: adding a seller, reviewing activity, and approving access requests.
The brand owner adds a seller by picking a role and a scope of ownership.
Every change is logged, with who made it and when.
The seller gets an email as soon as they are approved.
Brand Manager
Selected screens from the Brand Manager dashboard: applying for brand privileges, tracking application status, and staying updated via notifications. The brand list itself had to work as a data-dense table (brand, role, scope of ownership, status, start and expiration dates), where the information hierarchy carried as much of the design as any individual screen.
Tracking an application, and fixing errors
- Application detail: A seller can open any application and see its status, role, privileges, and documents.
- Errors on the form: If something is missing, the form says what to fix, and keeps what the seller already entered.
What actually happened
Measured against the December 2023 product requirements, the results were much better than anticipated.
Five times what the business case projected.
More of the catalog now has a brand owner or authorized reseller behind it.
Registrations grew four times over in two years.
These are team results, with design contributing alongside product and engineering.
Impact
The redesigned Brand Portfolio replaced an ad hoc, request-by-request process with a self-serve, auditable roles model for managing a brand's Seller ID hierarchy, consolidating two disconnected processes into one system and giving sellers a real edge against platforms like Amazon's Brand Registry.
The redesigned Brand Portfolio experience improved content management across 5.7M branded products and contributed to $250M in incremental brand GMV.
Brand owners went from no formal concept of a "brand team" to full visibility into who had access and why.
Supporting pages
As part of this project, I expanded sections on each of these three pages — a landing page, a marketing page, and a help center — explaining what Brand Portfolio is and how it can help sellers.
Why I designed these too
Brand owners see these pages before they see the product. The pages had to explain it the same way the product works.
Revenue & GMV growth
Brand protection built in
Help center & guidance
Build buyer trust
Marketing page
A longer-form page walking through each core capability, including managing brands, protecting IP, building a brand portfolio, and account benefits, aimed at educating prospective brand owners.
Landing page
The public entry point for Brand Portal, introducing the product, who's eligible, what's needed to get started, and a short FAQ before a seller ever creates an account.
Help page
The in-product help center for Brand Portal, answering the most common questions sellers have once they're already signed in and managing brands, users, and claims on a day-to-day basis.
What I learned
Fewer special cases make a system easier to trust. I learned that when both request paths ran on the same shared roles, there was one model to test, support, and audit. Every exception I could avoid was one less thing to explain.
Most of the confusion lives between yes and no. I learned that when the only answers are approve or deny, an incomplete request looks like a bad one. The “needs more information” state and the five registration statuses came out of that.
The pages around a product are part of the product. I learned that brand owners meet the landing page, marketing page, and help center before the tool itself, so those pages have to explain Brand Portfolio the way it actually works.
Why I like this kind of work
I like complicated systemsI’m drawn to systems where the interface carries risk: who sees what, who can act, and when it’s wrong.
I design the error cases tooA denied request, a stalled approval, an expired credential. I design those states as carefully as the happy path.
I work closely with product and engineeringI join product and engineering early on data models, audit requirements, and edge cases, before anything is built.
Why bring me onto your team
If you're hiring for a system where access, permissions, or data integrity actually matter, this is the kind of problem I want to work on. I partner early with engineering, design for the failure states most teams handle last, and I'd bring that same approach to whatever complex system your team is untangling next.
"Amanda could handle large, complex initiatives and consistently deliver them within ambitious timelines. She was a true team player, keeping pace with a fast-moving roadmap while never losing sight of the bigger picture. She partnered well with product managers, had a strong grasp of customer problems, and communicated UX principles and design standards clearly and effectively. I could always trust her to deliver on complex initiatives under tight timelines — a real testament to her command of both product and UX thinking."
