Shopping cart

What was the problem 

Trade me wanted to start to turn an secondhand e-commerce marketplace into a more traditional e-commerce platform to increase purchases per member and change its brand perception.

Challenges 

This problem sounds simple enough but there are many challenges based on Trade Me’s business model. Trade Me is a platform for connecting buyers to many different sellers across some of the biggest variety of inventory in NZ all without holding any of it.

Not holding any inventory and purchasing across multiple sellers has a unique UX challenge. Unlike other shopping carts we needed to indicate that the items would not arrive in a typical single delivery when purchased across multiple sellers. To solve this we grouped all items by the sellers and provide individual shipping options to make this clear while fitting in Trade Me antiquated shipping architecture. This differs from the typical cart experience and to insure with works with our users we conducted in office usability testing with our users. 

Another challenge was a simple streamline purchase process across multiple sellers. With some sellers offering only bank deposit other with cash on pick up. As a product team needed to make some compromises and had some tough but healthy discussion from many different angles. We had balance the complexity of making multiple payments for a single purchase from a UX perceptive, with the volume of listings if we excluded purchase options. We decided to favor the simplest UX solution only providing credit card transactions through the shopping cart.

The solution

To support the purchase of multiple items the shopping cart isn’t a unique solution across competing e-commerce platforms. To achieve this we needed to understand all parts of the purchases process and the unique challenges of Trade Me.

From the support of multiple sellers and an antiquated shipping architecture we created a popular solution that X million dollars of transactions a year and is used for 17% of all transactions on Trade Me. 

Focused on possibilities but grounded in reality

I see the possibilities of this work outside if the boundaries of the project and enjoy discussing it when the right opportunity arises. This discussions have feed into the rebuilding of our shipping infrastructure this year (2021) which is feeding into my vision of providing competitive combined shipping solution that the cart was designed to do.

The purchase process is yet to change but as the more antiquated purchase methods become more obsolete and our fee model becoming confusing and uncompetitive. It’s only a matter of time before these constraints are relinquished and we have a seamless cart experience across all purchases on Trade Me.