TRADELING MESSAGING AND NEGOTIATION
OBJECTIVE
In e-commerce, sometimes the seller prices may not be attractive to buyers. These buyers need a mechanism to ask sellers to lower their prices. To enable this negotiation process, I was asked to design an end to end flow of messaging and negotiation.
CHALLENGES
This project was a very complex due to its endless scenarios. Each scenario required unique designs from the buyer’s and seller’s point of view with required actions. One of the biggest challenges was to prevent buyers and sellers from sharing their contact details which may lead the conversion to go outside of the e-commerce platform. Another challenge was enabling negotiation for the “Request for Quotation (RFQ) products.
PROCESS OVERVIEW
This project was already studied and benchmarked when I took over. Thus, firstly I analyzed the previous work of another product designer. My product manager also asked me to continue the work directly with the UI, thus I skipped the pre design processes and directly started to design all possible buyer seller scenarios on Figma. Since this project was about negotiation, buyer and seller would see different information and actions based on the scenarios. This is why In Figma I segregated the UI between Sellers and Buyers.
SUGGESTION
Enable predefined messages and actions between and buyer to avoid moving the conversion out of the e-commerce platform. Segregate buyer and seller interactions and design how buyer and seller view each scenario with the available negotiation actions
The negotiation scenarios:
Buyer requests for a better price.
Seller accepts buyer’s offer
Seller sends counter offer
Seller rejects buyer’s offer
Seller updates his previous offer
Seller cancels his previous offer
Buyer accepts Seller’s counter offer
Buyer sends counter offer to Seller’s counter offer
Buyer rejects Seller’s counter offer
Buyer updates his previous offer
Buyer cancels his previous offer
THE TEAM
The team consisted of me as the senior product designer, the product manager Mafia and in the first week of the project another product designer John was part of the team. Later he left the project. I led the whole project and worked on all the phases.
PROCESS DETAILS
Firstly I analyzed the pre design work and study. Secondly I grouped the interactions as “Entry points, Buyer actions, Seller actions and Emails” When the all the interactions and all the possible user scenarios are defined I worked on the UI to deliver the project on time.
