Stakeholders
VP of Product
Senior Product Designer
Growth Product Manager
FE Software Engineers
BE Software Engineer
Duration
1st phase | Product Discovery
Oct 2023 - 2 weeks
2nd phase | Ideation & Wireframing
Dec 2023 - 1 week
Overview
At Qogita, we understand that our buyers are highly price-sensitive, but the prices we display aren’t always the most competitive.
To tackle this, we developed Hot Deals, a feature that offers competitive offers when sellers provide lower prices and have enough stock to meet the Minimum Order Value (MOV).
In the early stages of my internship, I led the design and development of Hot Deals. Partnering with our senior designer, I used my sales skills to recruit buyers for research and help create personas and journey maps in the first stage of this project.
Later, this research helped us understand the importance of pricing for our buyers, driving the development of Hot Deals to better serve their needs.
HIGHLIGHTS
Hot deals badge | catalogue
Hot deals | Product detail page
CONTEXT
Understanding wholesale buying workflows.
Buyer feedback has shown that our ordering flow is hard to understand.
We actually don't really know our buyers- we realised we needed a deeper understanding of our wholesale buyers and their purchasing behaviours. Our initial insights were limited, leaving us unsure of how buyers typically buy wholesale.
We want to identify the key concepts and tools that wholesale buyers use during their purchasing process.
Action plan for understanding wholesale buyers.
Our goal is to determine the necessary criteria buyers consider when finalising a sale. This will ensure our product aligns with their decision-making process.
We plan to compare the wholesale buyer workflow with our platform to identify user frustrations and pain points.
By finding these challenges, we can make specific changes to improve the UX. We want to make the buying process easier and keep buyers happy.
RESEARCH APPROACH
Understanding buyer needs and the questions we want to answer.
What is the buyer workflow for placing an order?
How do they initiate the buying process and conduct it?
What goes into making a decision and finalising a purchase?
Does our current flow match the buyer's workflow?
How painful is the experience currently at Qogita?
User interviews & survey criteria.
We focused on interviewing buyers who completed orders, using both interviews and a survey to gather insights into their Qogita experience. By sticking to a single user group, we streamlined the process to meet our two-week research timeline.
Survey participants
Collected 19 responses.
Interviews
Conducted with 6 participants.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Who are our users?
Amazon resellers
Resellers are usually small businesses with 1-5 team members. A single decision maker typically oversees operations.
Retailers
Retailers often opt to specialise in specific consumer categories, aiming to position themselves as experts in a particular field. Procurement decisions are influenced by factors like product quality, brand reputation, and consumer demand, not solely reliant on supply considerations.
Demand vs. supply-driven sourcing
Demand-driven
The buyer starts their product discovery & evaluation process by first exploring what’s popular on Amazon or B2C marketplaces, and then seeing if they can get a good price for those items.
Supply-driven
The buyer begins their product discovery by creating a list of wholesalers or suppliers and downloading price lists. They focus on finding the lowest-priced goods or major discounts, then analyse each product further to assess demand and seller requirements.
Amazon resellers — light vs power users.
Light users
They have limited time and tech proficiency, prefer a centralised approach and view wholesale buying as a side hustle.
Power users
They are full-time wholesale buyers who employ complex strategies similar to stock traders. They aggregate data from multiple sources and are comfortable with a decentralised approach to sourcing.
Understanding retailers.
Demand-driven sourcing in retail
Retailers are demand-driven, using data to explore products, but decisions are always based on margin. They typically order in two ways: when restocking or when adding new products to their inventory.
Restocking
To restock inventory, a list of low or out-of-stock items is first generated. This list is then sent to suppliers, who provide their offers. The offer with the lowest price is selected to replenish the stock efficiently.
New products
Retailers track trends on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Decision-makers select products, which the procurement manager then sources from wholesalers or marketplaces like Qogita.
Main pain points:
Difficulty finding the right suppliers with suitable terms.
Need for clear visibility of minimum order quantity during the ordering process.
Limited capital and insufficient credit options.
Constant struggles with stock availability, including limited stock holding from direct suppliers
DESIGN FOCUS
Ensure buyers with limited capital are supported by providing access to suppliers offering favourable terms, such as competitive pricing and flexible minimum order quantities.
THE PROBLEM
Qogita buyers and price sensitivity.
While we recognise our buyers' sensitivity to pricing, we're consistently offering the best possible deals. Even when sellers offer lower prices and meet the Minimum Order Value, we sometimes miss the opportunity to present more competitive prices for fixed quantities.
Firstly, we need to understand what deals we can offer. We must have enough stock to cover the seller MOV, seller price and margin.
PROJECT KICKOFF
Uncovering constraints.
Initial research suggests we can offer deals with at least 5% savings on a select portion of our strategic products.
Users will have a time limit on their carts; after it expires, the cart becomes invalid, though the deal may still be available.
Buyers will see a maximum of 2 deals per product, chosen to avoid limited deal availability.
For this iteration, buyers can purchase only one deal at a time.
IDEATION
So how should we approach this?
With a tight 1-week turnaround, I jumped into high-fidelity wireframing to quickly ideate. I identified two key areas for showcasing hot deals—catalogue and product detail page. Using design patterns from other marketplaces and our badge component, I explored ways to visually highlight deals with colour cues.
PRODUCT CARD DESIGN EXPLORATION
product detail page design exploration
SOLUTION
Time to present to senior stakeholders.
After designing a few options, I presented them to senior stakeholders. We favoured the option with the fire emoji due to its similarity to a pattern on our seller's portal. To create a fresh look, we opted for the black badge component recently added to our design system and ready to be implemented by our engineers.
Fixed-price HOT deals.
Offer a max of two deals on PDPs, allowing buyers to purchase a fixed quantity (or a range based on MOV and stock) at a fixed price.
The deal will be shown alongside Qogita’s standard price.
Ensure the deals are visible in the product catalogue (displayed clearly on the product card) and PDP,
There will be a step between "buy now" and checkout where users select the quantity in a modal. Once the quantity is chosen, they'll be directed to checkout.
FINAL DESIGNS
FINAL DESIGNS
QUANTITY SELECTION MODAL
ESTIMATED IMPACT
Key metrics.
Monitor how many users complete their purchase after clicking "Buy Now" for hot deals.
Measure this against the completion rate for orders at the regular "Qogita price."
Supportive metrics.
GMV from hot deals.
Hot deals click rate.
How many times users click "Buy Now" compared to how many times the product page with hot deals is viewed.
Hot deals conversion rate.
Hot deals funnel analysis.
ITERATION
What's the hot deal price?
During the feature rollout, we noticed some users were confused by the difference between the regular Qogita price and the discounted "hot deal" price in the catalogue. To address this, we refined the design of the product card, making it easier for buyers to identify the discount. The updated design was launched a few weeks later.
FINAL DESIGN iteration
RETROSPECTIVE
Key takeaways.
Before diving into ideation, it's crucial to have a clear understanding of the technical limitations from both the Backend and Frontend perspectives.
It's helpful to agree on which design system components to use for new features and how they can meet the requirements of the feature being worked on.
Maintaining effective alignment with stakeholders is crucial for keeping the project focussed and minimising last-minute changes. However, it's also beneficial to remain open-minded.
Maintaining an updated design file, ready for handover to senior stakeholders or Front-End engineers, is essential. Clear communication is paramount, ensuring the entire team is informed of any changes promptly.
