Curated B2B
Marketplace
January - November 2020 (11 months)
Objective
Build a curated food & beverage B2B marketplace and trade platform of verifiable, international traders.
Problem Statement
The venture was conceived while I was working at BCG with the client Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore. Our vision was to enable seamless cross-border trade through a trusted, global network of buyers and suppliers using verifiable credentials created on the blockchain. They were supposed to be an answer to the growing challenges in the trade industry:
Finding trustworthy and reliable trade counter parties that match the buyer’s requirements
Finding the right product offerings at the right price & quality that match the buyer’s requirements
Executing the trade in an efficient manner (contracting, paying, logistics)
Key Goals
Provide semi-curated search functionality for the buyers to easily find the trustworthy trade partners
For the suppliers provide easy to use and intuitive profile and catalogue creation functionality
Build frictionless decentralized identity creation through registration process
Build a landing page for the marketplace encouraging sign ups
Impact
In this project, I led the design of a curated B2B marketplace for international traders, solving key trust and efficiency challenges in global trade. My contributions focused on creating a semi-curated search functionality, which improved product discoverability, and designing a decentralized identity registration process to enhance trust through verifiable credentials. I also developed supplier profile and catalog features, improving user engagement by 200% during market experiments. The design work resulted in higher user acquisition and increased confidence among buyers and suppliers, setting a scalable foundation for future platform growth.
Solution
As for Alpha release we are allowing both buyers and sellers to get instantly verified through the onboarding process. Buyers will be able to search and discover products from verified suppliers. The communication will happen off the platform. Suppliers can create their profiles, upload products and product catalogues.
Visit the Trustana (Previously Trident) marketplace online: https://www.trustana.com/
Key features
Search and explore the products
Our marketplace enables buyers and suppliers to search for products or explore categories, view curated offers, and discover products based on search queries. Each product card displays key details and supplier information, allowing users to explore further or submit custom inquiries if needed. Additionally, users can browse categories to analyze current market trends.
Search and explore
Product pages
Each product page contains the product information as well as condensed supplier profile. It invites the users to go and explore the supplier information but also allow for making quicker decisions when it comes whether to engage with that supplier or not.
Product pages
Supplier profiles
The supplier profile is divided into sections to easily navigate. The products section serves as a catalogue of the products that can be filtered out. The profile contains the overview of the verifiable credentials.
Supplier profiles
Create supplier profile and add products
Suppliers can set up their profiles in few steps. Each section of the profile has been carefully curated and tested with users to help suppliers provide most desirable information by the buyers.
Suppliers can add products to their profile and manage them. We have tested in the market the most desirable product data points and included them into the product pages to set the suppliers for success.
Create supplier profile and add products
Onboard buyer and supplier
Our registration process not only verifies your company identity and feeds the platform with only registered, verified users but also opens the doors to owning your own data. The onboarding process creates decentralized identity which is anchored on the blockchain and allows for full data ownership in the later stages of the platform.
Onboard buyers and suppliers
Design process
The whole process was divided into 3 phases: validation, alpha and beta. Validation was meant to unblock the biggest technical friction - digital identity creation. I was assigned with the creation of the assets and testing the onboarding experience where the digital identity is created. During alpha phase we wanted to learn more about the buyer seller interactions, what makes up a buyer/seller profile and test value proposition and incentives to trade. Beta phase was to co-create the non-regretable features with users, acquire leads, learn about the international trade in food and beverage and be ready for launch.
Our hypothesis
People want to trade with verified/ trustworthy suppliers
People want to trade with supplier whose products are verified and trustworthy
People want to easily find high-quality products at affordable price meeting their requirements/ standards
People want curated search results to find match in no time
People want a trusted party in between such as platform or agent bringing assurance to the trade
How might we's
Personas
International trade is complex. It requires many stakeholders as well as many documents being provided by the parties. There are also many checks being made when products are being shipped such as lab test reports as an example. Blockchain can become helpful when it comes to:
When trust takes time to build
Promotes accountability
Promotes transparency
Promotes privacy
Can make processes faster such as verifications
Can be portable to other platforms
The initial user research was divided into 3 phases: learning about the incentives to perform trade from the supplier and buyer side, validating the digital identity creation and lastly perform an actual international trade to learn from that experience.
When we talked to buyers and suppliers we performed user interviews and used card sorting to showcase datapoints. It helped us to understand what is most important to people doing international trade and what people would like to see on our platform.
Phase 1: Finding the right match
Phase 1 was ethnographic research. We wanted to learn what is their current workflow when performing trades, what is important for their business as well as their pain points with the current solutions. Finding the right product and a supplier to trade with happens on various levels:
1st level: price, pictures/videos, samples, MoQ
2nd level: product details
3rd level: supplier profile details
Phase 2: Testing digital wallet
Testing digital wallet - learnings
Owning data and identity value becomes apparent after the product market fit is found
Phase 3: Imitate concierge
The goal of this phase was to conduct a trade between parties and get a good understanding what people are looking for in trade partner without having a real product built yet. My role was to create assets for this to happen - supplier and buyer profiles that were sent as jpeg's in the email exchange.
I prepared various mockups and played around with different ideas that could be tested with the buyers to get their reactions:
Interest in verified vs non-verified information
Hiding information and asking to request it if interested
Exposing some information to give incentive to request to see the rest
Prioritization of the information
Exposing alarming information about the seller
That allowed me to get to the final mockup of the testing phase and also give opportunity to the team to validate their assumptions about the technical feasibility of having many credentials validated on the platform.
Competitive research
We are not the first ones solving all of the trade platform features. They have been solved and tested in the real world. Sometimes we might need to look at different profile of the product that might be utilizing the feature that we want to implement. By knowing what direct and indirect competition is doing we can design for the best experience and perhaps do even better than them.
I divided my analysis efforts into different aspects of the user journey ands captured the findings in the tables below.
There is 1st day trust and there is trust that users can gain after using product for longer period of time. Building 1st day trust happens at various touch points when interacting with:
marketing site
marketing materials
customer service
product
If we are consistent about how we communicate our brand among these touch points we have a big chance for success!
Then we have other trust indicators that take longer to observe. They are build over time and need to be delivered consistently. These trust indicators could be divided into:
Trust in the brand
Trust in the platform
Trust in the service being offered
Trust in other buyers and suppliers
Trust in the products being displayed
E2E user flows
I was responsible for creating E2E user flows starting from registration process to managing verifiable credentials. The features were assigned to specific phase of the product development.
I had to gather engineers, strategic designers, PM’s in one room to confirm the proposed flows
Helped us to foresee where the trust indicators should be placed
Sign up/ Login/ Verification user flows
Order management user flows
Decision making board for happy path MVP
Design principles
Design principles provide unified grounds to create clarity and reduce ambiguity around design decisions when strategizing working on product features. These principles should be reflected in the user flows and experiences that we create. They should help us when making critical decisions about what our brand stands for and what product/ venture decisions we will be making going forward.
Buyer and supplier dashboards branding
Since our marketplace was composed of two sides - one for seller and one for buyer we wanted to have a clear distinction on the visual side. Buyer dashboard was lighter with a strong blue accent. The seller side was darker with blue accent highlight major call to actions.
Trustana Identity
Once the new designer was hired i took a lead in finishing the brandbook which outlays all the branding components and how they should be used and not used.
User testing
Before I handed over the designs to the engineering I performed usability testing. I was able to do it with 3 suppliers and 1 buyer. On top of that I also run a survey with 50 international traders. It can help with data prioritization or reveal what is important to their purchasing strategies.
1
buyer to do in-depth usability testing with
3
suppliers to do in-depth usability testing with
50
buyers to run survey with
Onboarding
Questions
- Is the role choice clear to the user?
- Do you users feel comfortable and secure providing information about their business?
- Do users know why they need to be verified?
- How do users feel about the length of the onboarding process?
- Are the instructions clear to the user?
Learnings
- Users would like to have a way to go back if they make a mistake with choosing their role
- Make it clear when we require a name in Chinese
- Chinese suppliers did not understand the popup informing about which information will be used to verify their business profile
- Users normally would not check the data coming from other platform
- Users were clicking couple of times on the button when the system was authenticating
Buyer - search and discover
Questions
- Understand common behavior patterns in searching
- Understand which curation methods would appeal the most for our users
- Learn about the format preference of users to see search results
- Learn about the content users need to see on the search results cards and product cards on the supplier page
- Learn about other intentions user might have except looking to buy a product
- Learn about different behavior models of users exploring the platform to find the product/supplier they are looking for
Learnings
- Both buyer and supplier find browsing categories useful
- Suppliers want to sort results by the most trusted supplier
- Users want to see recommended results
- Making custom inquiry is highly desirable by the buyer if it contains messaging that we will get back as soon as possible
The most important pieces of information about the product when it comes to deciding whether or not to purchase
Product certification
Delivery terms
Product ingredients
Product videos
Reviews
Lab test report
Lead time
The most important pieces of information about the supplier when it comes to deciding whether or not to purchase
Company certificates
Main export markets
Reviews
How do you prefer your product search results to be sorted?
Popularity
Newest products
Reviews
Supplier profile
Questions
- Understand if the data points provided on the designed supplier profile are valuable to the supplier (find out the order of importance) as well as the buyer
- Whether they are presented in the right format/order
- Are they willing to share this data with Trustana and buyers?
- Are any other data points that we could add?
Learnings
- Quality control
- Certification
- Equipment
- Product pictures
- Bank info
- Business terms - necessary
- Quality control - necessary
- Product catalog & features products - necessary
- R&D capabilities - good to have
- Export markets - extra info
- Factory profile - extra info
- Production - not relevant
Product page & add/manage products
Questions
- Understand what F&B specific information would be MUST HAVE, NICE TO HAVE, and NOT NEEDED for sellers so that buyers would be interested in a purchase (prioritization of items)
- Understand the usability aspects of the update product page such as prices per unit, free-input table
- Understand what are the common product specific information buyers are inquiring
- Learn about common behaviors around managing products either in the supplier own inventory system or other trading platforms
- Uncover any usability frictions with the clickable prototype prepared around adding, editing, removing and previewing products
Learnings
- Price depends on the quantity so indicating that price is negotiable and invites buyers to contact supplier
- Lead time actually means production time
- Make it very clear when something is published to the online store and not just saved
- Suppliers are used to their products being reviewed by the platform
- Duplicating product is highly desirable
- Supplier wants to keep the products even they are not available to keep buyers interested
- Suppliers want to preview the changes before publishing them
- Saving drafts is highly desirableHaving import CSV option would be very useful
Data testing capture table consisting of the following fields: Page, data field, data field in Chinese, type, group name, detail, priority, decision, testing comments, what does it mean?, what would you enter?, buyer comments and sample
First use funnel
Questions
- Uncover any gaps in terms of the information provided so that the buyer and supplier has clarity at every step what will happen next
- Uncover any usability issues when walking through the entire flow clickable prototype and performing given tasks
Learnings
- Sellers natural behavior is to manage their store (profile+products) after onboarding
- Suppliers need a clear guidance that after editing profile they can add products
- Seller would like to see a summary of the steps in order to be guided on what to do
- Buyers should see the incentive to trade, before in the experience rather than only when they want to contact supplier
- Sellers would like to know how buyers will contact them
- Sellers would like to have more possibilities to show their products as well as the factory
- When adding integration with a 3rd party people want to feel more secure/ Branding is one of the aspects that can bring security
Launch of Alpha Product
On top of being responsible for the successful build of the marketplace I was also responsible for creating assets needed for the launch of the marketplace in SEA market. My responsibilities included:
2 marketing landing pages for supplier and buyer
Set up social media accounts
Set up event funnels in Mixpanel, Segment, HotJar to track user behavior
Social media ads (Linkedin, Adwords, WeChat, Facebook, IG)
Email campaign
Onboarding materials for suppliers
Newsletter email
Incentive explanation landing page
Success metrics
Around that time we launched the platform I was already handing over my role to the designer we hired and I was not able to be part of the team to see how the platform evolves. While I was still there we established the metrics that were going to track to measure the success of the platform:
Facilitate the completion of initial trades with full delivery on the platform
Ensure that users initiate and progress trades on the platform, aiming to build a strong pipeline of active transactions
Encourage buyers to engage with suppliers by sending inquiries via email through the platform
Ensure that suppliers respond to buyer inquiries, fostering communication and trust on the platform
Direct users to click the “Contact Supplier” CTA to initiate contact with suppliers
Drive user registration by achieving successful sign-ups to the platform
Guide potential users to click the “Sign Up” CTA on the marketing site to register on the platform
Encourage users to make custom product requests through the platform, enhancing buyer-supplier interaction
Main learnings
Share early and often: Share designs early and often to bring alignment across the team and get necessary feedback to progress.
Design for first time users: Think about what the experience be like for new users coming to the platform, what guidance do they need and how to set them for success.
Design for early stages: In the beginning our platform won’t have much information. We need to have this mindset and design for the needs of the customers that won’t see a lot of search results for example.
Validating data: Testing for data might require different format of testing such as in our case it was creating a spreadsheet and literally testing every field with the users.
Testing in B2B space: Recruiting users might not be easy in B2B. Get ready for other ways to test such as launching a survey via the agency that has access to the specific user segment
Localization: Localization became a priority. Users from different regions of the world behave differently. It might be that they have their work arounds, the industry language they use is different, their mental model might be different and the simplicity they require might be different then other regions
Design for blockchain: Majority of people heard of blockchain but don’t know about its value. It is important to think how might we bring the new solutions to the users.
New technological paradigms: It will take time to educate people about new technologies and it is fine! Accept the challenge and iterate.