Shopify Vendors
Made with Figma
Shopify Vendors is Shopify's B2B product that helps small and medium sized vendors to reach consumers and grow in the digital economy.
To address a variety of demographics, regions, and business sectors, our project applies artifical intelligence to enable entrepreneurs to tap into the ecosystem of the existing Shopify subscribers. In turn, re-imagining Shopify subscribers as customers for the new entrepreneur.
I and UX Designer Adrian led the full design process of this project. I collaborated with data analyst (Arnauld) and web developers (Eric, Michael, Yan) throughout this project.
To help Shopify better leverage it's ecosystem, our team dived into exploring new regions and business sectors and found that Brazil, a leading country in e-commerce start-ups, is among one of the lower global rankings for countries using Shopify with merely 13% of entrepreneurs.
We recognized that with a focus on a top growing e-commerce country, the potential in delivering Shopify's ecosystem could be massive.
GoalBy leveraging off preexisting Shopify subscribers we can increase consumer sales among entrepreneurs through an exclusive Shopify tree where vendors can receive product recommendations based on inventory needs and purchase behaviour. In turn, first time merchants can immediately gain traffic by getting matched to relevant vendors they can personally connect with.
To build a recommendation engine that automatically connects merchants to new and existing vendors, a two step AI integration is required to be emplaced. The power of AI recognition will extract past purchase behaviours and interests from most favourited brands and in turn present complimentary products for vendors.
Our UsersTo help progress our product strategy, a user persona was developed based on Brazil's demographics of entrepreneurs in our primary research. The persona will align our project goals with impact statements to meet the interests of our closest users.
Often excited to run their own company, these first time entrepreneurs are eager and ambitious to get their business set. They are hard working and spend hours looking for opportunities to generate revenue and improve branding. However due to several factors, the cost of operating a business often does not add up and companies are forced to close. More than anything, they want to be seen on the market and gain traction before their competitors.
Due to the time constraints, we focused on building one task flow for the merchant side of a prospective new entrepreneur.
To maintain consistency and adhere to Shopify's Design System, Polaris, we first tested our design in greyscale wireframes for overall completeness in the user experience.
One of the benefits in Shopify's Ecosystem is the ability for subscribers to leverage off multiple services for an enhanced user experience. Incorporating a B2B e-commerce platform in Shopify will enable merchants to sell to wholesale and DTC customers easier all in one platform.
We made product listings more relevant with Shopify Vendors by notifying subscribers once a similar product is posted through filters and previous purchase trends. By automating an alert system we save merchants and consumers time from building a foundational customer base and searching for the right product.
Reduce marketing costs and get immediate traction with Shopify subscribers by connecting with vendors and building a customer base. By adding a B2B service, wholesale products reach customers before the merchants have to.
Promote products to subscribers and become part of the community. Receive discounts and earn points towards purchases when users buy wholesale for their own business.
To maintain consistency with Shopify's Design system, a design file was created before the project time to achieve a better understanding of the design library, Polaris.
LearningsAs this was the first time for most members working under a team setting with multiple new roles and a heavy time constraint, the team had to work quickly to learn about each other, find an approach to tackle the problem and figure out a team dynamic that worked best for everyone. Above all things, collaboration was a key component in making every aspect of the project come together through effective communication by listening and accompanying all our great ideas. As hectic as it was given the time constraints, the thrill of deep diving into a problem space and solutioning with a new team setting was an ultimate win on its own.
Often in the process, we wanted to skip lines and get right to the solution. This of course was not the most optimal choice, but what I'm trying to say is that the human brain has the tendency to skip parts and jump to conclusions when we get ideas in our heads. Although we were good and refrained from going right to the solution, we used this strategy to our benefit to work around time and jumped to processes only we thought would be most beneficial to help us refine our solution. In turn, this saved us a ton of time and allowed us to go back for review and feedback.
Next StepsContinue to design flows and launch feature to an initial, smaller set of categories and streamline user flow.
Refine and optimize user experience and AI models with preexisting SAAS models.
Push feature out to the rest of the categories within the Shopify ecosystem.