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Case Study

The Caribbean eCommerce Platform

Challenge

AwiMarketplace is a Caribbean based ecommerce platform that connects wholesale buyers and sellers of agricultural products. In Jamaica, farming and agriculture is big business, representing 6% of GDP. But much of the industry still runs on pen and paper and the sales cycle is unnecessarily long.. When hotels, restaurants, and businesses need to buy produce, they have to pickup the phone or type up an email. Not only is this time consuming, but it also makes it difficult to :

Compare Vendors

Have visibility into pricing and inventory

Place, track, and manage order

Automate Repetitive Task

AwiMarketplace is solving this by creating a centralized ecommerce platform for the entire agro industry to connect and exchange. They tapped us to design their web application and the marketing assets to help them launch.

Solution

AwiMarketplace is primarily a utilitarian product, so we wanted to focus on function, but with a clean and modern approach. The colors are soft, subtle, and minimal to emphasize legibility and scannability.

Visual Design

AwiMarketplace is primarily a utilitarian product, so we wanted to focus on function, but with a clean and modern approach. The colors are soft, subtle, and minimal to emphasize legibility and scannability.

User Expreience

We broke the project into two phases: UX Design and Branding. In Phase 1, we designed the product from end to end, including the use cases for buyers and sellers.

Sellers had no way to list or sell their products online
Buyers had no way to shop, compare, and place their orders

Our goal was to design a marketplace that would bring both parties together and streamline the value chain.
For the MVP, we focused on 4 key phases of the Customer Journey :

Search and Discovery

Consideration and Comparison

Purchase and Checkout

Order Management

Search

The first step in sourcing any product is finding what you want. In this case, buyers are somewhere along the spectrum of being completely undecided to knowing exactly what they’re looking for.

Curated Module

  • Instead of requesting product catalogs from every vendor under the sun, we designed multiple ways for people to shop the platform.

Merchandising Units

  • One of the most valuable spaces of real estate on any site is the home page header. This is also where you’ll get the most reach. It’s best practice to use this to delight, engage, or share pertinent information.
  • For ecommerce sites, this is the best place for your most compelling sales offers. We capitalized on this by designing templates for featured vendors, products, and promotions

Solution

Instead of requesting product catalogs from every vendor under the sun, we designed multiple ways for people to shop the platform.

Traditional Module

  • If looking for something specific, you can search the entire platform or a specific category at your leisure. For maximum control, you can filter your results by: category, price range, rating, popularity, or recency.
  • We also included a row of blurbs on the landing page for easy access to the top categories on the platform.

Consideration

Evaluating and comparing various product offerings to make the most informed decision.
Product image gallery to get a close up look
Descriptions for additional information and benefits
Category descriptors and recommended product modules context and easy access to similar items
A review section to hear what other customers are saying and get social validation

Purchase

We included a shopping cart and every product page has pricing and quantity information. There’s also an entry point to reach out to support for custom orders or in case questions come up. This is much easier than coordinating order forms via email and over the phone.

Order Management

Instead of sifting through email threads for the latest, we created a dashboard for buyers and sellers. This allows them to see their order history, receipts, wishlists, support tickets, and manage their account information.G

Branding

Once we finished designing the product, we also helped them prepare for their launch. Their sales team needed a set of visual aids to support product demos and pitches. So we designed two sales sheet templates and a pitch deck

Parting Thoughts

It was exciting thinking through how to design an MVP marketplace product. Given where the market is, there’s a lot of growth potential. It almost felt like we were laying the building blocks for the next Amazon of the Caribbean. It was also nice to get a change of pace from some of the marketing websites we’ve been doing and play around with something more complex.

We can’t wait to see how the platform continues to grow.

If you’d like to learn more about AwiMarketplace or discuss potential projects, feel free to shoot me a ping.
Till next time — own your power, give back, and leave no stone unturned. Black Lotus Out.

www.BlackLotus.co