Scaling up the business
One of the situation happening with the marketplaces landscape at the time is an increase of the service fee on each platform. On the other hand, if the sellers have already enough audience, managing business through their own personal web-store can be very profitable because they can capitalize on their profit and optimizing their sales.
We saw these as a great opportunity to educate and onboard marketplace sellers to build their own websites using our services. At the time, Plugo already has PlugoStore as e-commerce website builder. But we did need other services that would help our users to transition their sales in marketplaces to/from their own channel (website), an omni-channel platform, or later what we would call PlugoSync.
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Accepting the reality
Omni-channel platform is a very complex product, it would rely lot on the partner integration where each partner would have different requirements and restrictions. If we were to focus on the features, it would get us trapped in the details very easily and that would hinder our development.
We also started with a very minimum resources, 1 product designer, 1 back-end engineer, and 1 front-end engineer, to kickstart the development and to see how it would go.
Gathering the scope and requirements
At the time, my focus was to design a scalable product and experience. In order to do that, I would do lots of researches on each partners to build our own foundation. One of the example would be mapping each product details data, so we can come up with a universal model within our own platform.
And this is looking lots of API Documentation and trying out various case of business cases.
Going through with fast iteration of developments and feedbacks
We knew at the time that the product won’t be able to handle all possible use cases in one quick go, so we decided to build the product in fast iteration, we had to be prepared that there will be user feedback that we may have to respond quickly and the product may function quite poorly at the starting phase of each iteration. We just had to embrace the process.
The first MVP was released for small segment of users and I had to be closely involved with sales, onboarding, and ops team to gather direct feedbacks from our users to determine which features need to be prioritized and to keep improving the services.
Other than that, we also implement hotjar within our website, so we would know if there’s any direct requests from our users and we could learn from the recordings about the pain points of using our products so we can keep improving the user experience.
After a year of efforts…
We managed to integrate 5 marketplaces; PlugoStore, Tokopedia, TikTok Shop, Shopee, and Lazada and build these major features.
Catalog Sync
Our users can import products from other marketplace to our omni-channel and later they could publish the products back to the same or any other marketplaces.
Omni-chat
Our users could receive and reply all chats from their connected marketplaces in one place.
Stock Management
Our users could manage the stock distribution from their central warehouse to their sales channel.
Order Management
Our users could process all orders from their customers across marketplaces.
Analytics & Report
Our users could see their aggregated sales growth and report from their connected marketplaces.
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The result of trust and great team's effort
What I contributed was mostly about identifying the problems, scoping out the features, and shaping the user experience so the engineers can only focus on the implementation and the product can get delivered iteratively.
But I'd say that this complex product happened because of the mutual respects between designers and engineers, we believe that each role would deliver a great job so each person can focus on their own craft. I believe that's the best support you could get from a teammate.
Shout out to the great team of engineers! Namhoon, SeongGon, Johan, Seungjin, and Erica.