The challenge
Tienda Nube is an E-Commerce service in LATAM, providing local businesses with a platform to create their online shops. Each business can hire them and have their online store with their own domain. We knew for fact that one of the biggest problems these stores face is generating sales leads, and that there is no marketplace for all of their products.
The immediate solution
So along with 3 friends, while still on our daily jobs, and as a way to experiment with technologies, we Designed & Developed Dripi, a Product Aggregator for Tienda Nube stores, inspired in Canopy.co. The platform allowed Tienda Nube site owners to connect their stores and publish their products onto it. With them, anyone interested would be able to create and curate their own product collections. These collections would be the corner stone of our model, helping drive traffic to the item’s store. The system could also track if a sale had been made by way of Dripi generated traffic. The Store Owner dashboard displayed the number of views and conversions the site had generated for each product. Our monetization model was simple Cost Per Sale, charging a minimal fee on this conversion.
Consumers would also be able to save items, follow other users and their collections. In a future state it would eventually create enough data for us to suggest products based on categories and social graph relations.
The work
One of our partners was focused on the visuals, the rest of us were focused strongly on Back End, Front End, and creating a CI/CD pipeline. The 3 of us felt comfortable enough iterating the design directly on the code, so we could make proposals if we had any ideas we wanted to test or solve issues quickly.
The learning
After operating the site for a couple months and running some user surveys we came to the conclusions that local consumers found little value in this and we were not very good marketers. Since we were already over budget, we stopped operations. We focused so much on the business side of the channel, we neglected creating actual value for our consumers. We followed our generative skills and did not frame the problem from the end users point of view. Since we were experimenting, the experience provided great education for all of us in many senses.
Greatest hits
- We onboarded +200 stores on our first day
- Entire front end was AngularJS based on top of a PHP REST API. I Personally coded factories, values, controllers, directives and setup Grunt and Yeoman dev flows on our git repository for continuous Integration through codeship.com