Shoptopup

Hundreds of thousands of retailers of all sizes across Africa use ShopTopUp to get access to business loans and inventory to stock up their shops daily.

Headquarters

Oregun, Lagos

Market St, San Francisco

Funding

$123M

TradeDepot’s Shoptopup

Grow your retail business

Overview

Shoptopup Supershop is an app targeted at retailers to help grow their businesses by providing access to restock their shop from various brands at the best wholesale prices and also access to loans over a specified timeline for purchase of products

ShopTopUp partners with distributors and manufacturers to make sure that all your inventory needs are met in one central place, from the comfort of your phone, just order your items, pay and get everything delivered to you at once.

Tools

Figma
Principle
Zeplin
Illustrator
Whimsical

Role

User Research
User Interface Design
Design Thinking
Frontend Dev (Web)

Timeline

2 – 3 Months

The Objective

The primary objectives was to make it much easier for retailers to stock up their stores without leaving their location thereby simplifying and digitising micro retail distribution also enabling easier discovery of products and promotions from wholesaler and providing loan option which converts to commitment. How can this app (supershop) help retailers grow their retail business

Users Goals : Get the best prices for wholesale products, discover promotions from top brands and also be rewarded for commitment

Business Goals : Get users to subscribe, increase users orders to 3x or more and also lay emphasis on the loan option

Target Audience (Who is this app for) : Retailers who wants to grow their business

Ux Research

My Process.

Interviews – Competitor Analysis – User Flow – Sketch – Wireframe – Visual Design – Prototype

User Interviews

I conducted interview with four participants all licensed retailers between the age 28 to 48, two done in person and others were conducted remotely means of video call

Assumptions

Retailers have a hard time finding promotions from big brands, also retailers are not equiped enough to funnel down brands to the cheapest rate

Findings

Retailers have a relationship with their suppilers which gives room for them to pay later based on agreement from both parties (this is a perfect use case for the loan option made available on the app) also 4 out of 10 retailers are not tech savy thereby hindering the rate of orders on the app, the means of marketing (social media)that was being used, was not the ideal route for our target user

User Persona

Created personas to better understand how I could help them achieve their goal using certain features in the app. These personas were crafted from the user interview / survey responses provided by retailers. For example, many retailers were interested in getting stocks at the cheapest prices, so I made that a core need for the personas.

Competitors Analysis

Competitive Analysis was performed to ascertain more about if or howapps in the same space handle the frustrations that users reported in the survey carried out. Below is a summary of how this app fall performs inline with the intended goal

High chances of running into fake sellers
The notorious case of what you ordered being different from what is delivered
App is not niched down to wholesale purchase
Long delivery time
No telesale option for the non tech savy
No reward system
No subscription option
No loan option

Key Insights

Jumia is definitely the most popular and the run to when it comes to e-commerce but it falls short in the cases listed above and most especially the fact that at the top level it is does not cater to B2B rather it lays emphasis on B2C

Take Away

Marketing done right yields popularity which in most cases propels trust

The range of product is not as vast as other competitors
what this app offers is far from the retailer stand point
Long delivery time
No telesale option for the non tech savy
No reward system
No subscription option
No loan option

Key Insights

Kongawhich at some point was among the front runner of ecommerce along side jumia lost alot of steam due to variousreason but one reason peculiar to this research was the Quality Control

Take Away

Quality check is very crucial if not the most important aspect of this market space

Ideate

Brainstormed and came up with a few ideas to tackle the pain ponts that was discoverd during the interview and research phase. The top ideas were:

Make sure users knows product listed are at the best prices available nation wide
Any process carried out on the app must be straight to the point, precise and clear
Easy brands promotions discovery
Awareness of the loan option available on the app

User Flow

Supershop Order flow

Supershop Loan flow

Early Sketches & Wireframes

Supershop Shop wireframe

Supershop Loan wireframe

The Solution

I designed a solution that help retailers discover promotions, products at their best prices and also brought the loan feature to the fore front and made show the flow to acquiring a loan was short and precise which was observed as a pain point from the interview conducted

Role

I was responsible for the UI/UX of this project. I designed the user flow and the UI and also conducted user interviews to understand the users pain points and areas that lead to abandonment of the app I worked along with senior product managers to design the features.