MY ROLE
Product Designer
Ux Research
Wireframing
YEAR
2023
INDUSTRY
E-Commerce
The rise of social media as a marketplace has presented challenges for online vendors in effectively managing their sales operations. Without a dedicated tool, vendors often find themselves overwhelmed with manual processes for receiving orders, coordinating deliveries, managing finances, and sending invoices and receipts. This results in inefficiencies, errors, and a poor customer experience. Vantage seeks to address these pain points by offering a centralized platform that simplifies and automates these tasks.
Online vendors often have difficulties successfully managing their businesses, particularly when dealing with orders received from multiple social media channels. Working with delivery agents is always tough, and inventory management can also be time-consuming. We designed vantage, an integrated environment for internet enterprises.
While discussing this project with the founder, I realized I was venturing into an unknown territory. The process of running a small scale business online in Nigeria appears foreign to me.
I set the criteria for people that recognised the need to move their business online and had previously tried out a few solutions. I held an interview session with 12 (twelve) "online vendors" so as to identify distinct issues these vendors encounter while running their business.
I identified the following pain points after synthesizing the data from the interview:
I conducted a competitive analysis of various business management apps for SMEs that were already available and took the time to thoroughly evaluate the workings of their processes through in-depth landscape evaluations.
Engaging in firsthand experiences with some of these applications enabled me to document successful practices, aligning with my current understanding of the reasons behind their choices and how they had executed them.
In the realm of e-commerce, order fulfilment stands as a critical bridge between the virtual storefront and the customer’s doorstep. It’s the pivotal moment where promises are either kept or broken, customer satisfaction solidified or lost.
After a customer places an order from a sales channel (store website, WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram), it appears on the orders tab in the vendor’s app, and a notification is also sent. Orders can also be created manually for orders made physically or outside the sales channel.
When the payment status has been confirmed, the next step involves preparing and delivering the item. This process is referred to as order fulfilment. After the order has been packaged and is ready for delivery, the vendor clicks on the “Mark as ready for delivery” button. Subsequently, the order appears on the courier app, allowing the delivery agent to proceed with delivering it to the customer.
To achieve a seamless order fulfilment process, we designed a courier mobile app where trusted delivery agents are onboarded.
To ensure customers receive the correct packages and to prevent false complaints of non-delivery, we designed a pin feature for precise delivery to the intended recipient. Upon delivery, the customer provides a 4-digit PIN, which is subsequently confirmed by the delivery agent.
Finance Management
Vantage Wallet provides our vendors with a transparent, trustworthy, and easy-to-use money management tool tailored to the needs of businesses. Payments for orders are paid to this wallet, allowing vendors to separate personal and business finances.
The Finances Overview page offers a detailed breakdown and analysis of your store’s financial performance within a chosen date range, presented through a series of cards and an exported PDF document.
Payments are made through Paystack's integration. Customers’ payments are deposited into the vendor’s Vantage wallet.
Inventory Management
Inventory tracking serves as a crucial tool in preventing the sale of products that are out of stock and in notifying you when it’s time to reorder or produce more of a particular product.
Sending Receipt and Invoices on Vantage
Receipts serve as customers’ evidence of their purchases and the corresponding amounts paid.
Receipts and invoices are automatically sent to customers. However, if vendors need to send them manually, they must select the particular order for which they wish to send an invoice or receipt. At the bottom of the screen, a “Send invoice” button appears if the payment status reads "unpaid,” and a “Send receipt” button appears if the payment status reads “paid.” The customer receives the receipt or invoice from the sales channel (social media app) through which they ordered the product.
Managing Multiple Social Media Apps
To reduce the burden of managing chats across multiple social media apps and increase response time, we designed a chat feature in the Vantage mobile app. This feature integrates messages from WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook into a single app. Vendors can seamlessly record sales, send automated messages and updates on orders, and streamline the process of sending invoices and receipts.
Customer Relation
"Customer is king"
Establishing stronger customer relationships may seem daunting at first. Nevertheless, we designed Vantage to streamline customer relations for online-based SMEs in the following ways:
Effective communication - According to our research, customers appreciate being kept in the loop. They value updates on their orders, including delivery status and notifications when their preferred products become available. To ensure effective communication between vendors and customers, we designed a campaign feature and an automated messaging tool where vendors can communicate effectively with their customers.
Marketing and campaigns - Marketing campaigns are structured sets of marketing activities aimed at promoting a product or sale within a specific timeframe, typically leveraging channels such as paid advertising and social media. These channels are a great way to share new products, discounts, and deals, keep in touch with your customers, and reach potential new customers.
Rewarding loyalty - From our research, customer loyalty programmes offer an effective means to enhance relationships with customers while simultaneously boosting revenue. A robust loyalty programme holds significance for both longstanding clients and newly acquired customers. By offering carefully curated discounts, rewards, and promotions, vendors can provide valuable benefits to those who consistently support their business. We designed the Vantage discount & coupon generator. Discounts are implemented through two methods: utilising a discount code and activating an automatic discount. With the discount code, customers must input a unique code manually, whereas automatic discounts are applied when customers fulfil specific conditions.
Outcome
This project was incredibly thrilling and enjoyable for me to be a part of, as it delivered tangible value, required extensive research, and involved intricate interaction efforts. From this experience, I gleaned several crucial insights regarding product and business processes, including:
Communication and collaboration - Effective communication and collaboration among cross-functional teams were critical to the success of the project.
User centered design is key - Throughout the entire process, it became evident that understanding the needs, behaviours, and pain points of the target users is paramount. By prioritising user-centric design principles, we were able to create a product that truly resonated with our audience and addressed their specific requirements.
Iterative design leads to improvement - Embracing an iterative design process allowed us to continuously refine and enhance the product based on user feedback and testing results. Each iteration brought us closer to our goal of creating a seamless and intuitive user experience.
Through a comprehensive design process focused on understanding user needs and addressing pain points, Vantage has successfully delivered a solution that empowers online vendors to thrive in the competitive world of social media commerce. With its intuitive interface, seamless integration, and powerful automation features, Vantage is poised to become the go-to tool for online vendors.