Building A Marketplace Platform
Treet is a platform that allows modern clothing brand’s biggest fans to buy and sell from each other
The Problem.
Treet is different from most online shopping experiences because of its marketplace nature. This means that shipping is not from a centralized warehouse, but from individual users, which brings up a few unique problems:
Fragmented Shopping Experience: With users directed immediately to a checkout, their shopping flow is interrupted.
High Shipping Costs: Because Treet doesn’t have a warehouse, shipping costs can go sky-high with just a few items purchased.
Overall the question that came from these two burning problems was if Treet could provide a shopping experience that feels more like buying from a single online shop, despite our peer-to-peer marketplace nature.
Metrics
A specific “add to bag” functionality (vs. checkout on a single item only) should bring with it an increased purchase rate.
Decreased shipping costs for our customers should also be seen as a result of this feature.
Wireframes
One key deliberation in this project was whether to retain a “buy now” option alongside the new “add to bag” feature. By mapping back to goals for this feature, I determined that it would be best to drop the “buy now” option in order to have a more clear understanding of shopping bag’s impact on our marketplaces after launch.
Mobile
For operations like editing the contents of a shopping bag, I made sure to optimize precise operations for mobile by making sure that larger touch targets were specified. I also looked to native mobile-behavior like “Edit” modes and swipe to delete operations, ensuring that such iterations were smooth on the implementation side.
Final Design
The final shopping bag design was sorted by seller. One feature of the final design that came out of iteration via mock-ups and collaboration with engineering was a visual link that directed users to adding more items from the same seller in the shopping bag modal itself.
Successes
30% Increase In Overall Purchases: With many of our buyers being repeat customers, the draw of combined shipping and a seamless shopping flow was more dramatic than we anticipated.
Next Steps
Bundling Discount: Through our customer research program, we discovered that many power sellers really value selling items quickly. We could expand this feature to incentivize bundling even more with discounts.