Small Business eCommerce Inventory Tracker

Many small business owners are selling products across multiple e-commerce platforms as well as in person.  Keeping updated inventory lists and consistent prices across all of these platforms can be time consuming and complicated.

Problem:

Many small business owners are selling products across multiple e-commerce platforms as well as in person.  Keeping updated inventory lists  and consistent prices across all of these platforms can be very time consuming and complicated which can lead to inconsistencies. This drain of time and resources, and inaccurate data can lead to lost sales and in unsatisfied customers.

Goal:

By using performing design sprints based on the design thinking methodology, which includes 4 stages: empathize, define, ideate, and test, the goal is to create a way for small businesses to more easily and quickly keep their shop inventory, across all of their e-commerce platforms as well as for their in-person sales, up to date with accurate information.  A successful product would be one that saves the shop owner time, increases accuracy in tracking inventory and therefore, increases sales and customer satisfaction.

Team

Personal Project

My Role

UX Designer (research, interaction design, visual design)

Time was taken at each of these stages and is outlined in the following pages. Though the process was often not linear, these are general processes that were used while designing.

Key Findings:

• There are key pieces of information that sellers need to be accurate, that change regularly, and need to be updated (preferably in real time).  These include:

  • Inventory quantity

  • Prices, including pieces that are on sale and for how long

  • Updated product photos

  • Product descriptions

  • Shipping costs if applicable

Insights:

Many small business owners struggle to keep information across all of their sales platforms consistent and up to date. This leads to confused customers, loss of sales, over/undercharging, and making sales when there is actually no inventory left for sale.

The time it takes to update this information across all platforms is very time consuming and leads to loss of time in doing other important tasks related to the business.

Opportunity:

There aren’t currently any well designed options out there that help to streamline the process of selling across many e-platforms as well as in-person sales.

To help generate ideas and possible solutions, I created a quick list of possible solutions generated from asking things like “what exists already?”, “what can be improved upon?”, “is there anything than can be combined, adapted, modified, put to another use or eliminated?”.

So What?

• An app makes sense in this case

  • Something that the sellers could use both for in person sales as well as when they are doing work behind the scenes with online platforms (e-Commerce channels)

• Some way to make sure that information across all platforms is up to date

• Simple and straightforward is key here!

  • The process is already very complicated and has a lot of data input required, so the design needs to be simple and allow for quick input as well as easy readability and accessibility

Problem Statement

Wire Frames to begin to map out user flow

Low-Fidelity Sketches to map out how the interfaces might look

UI Design

It was then time to breathe life into the app with an initial implementation of color and UI elements. I made sure that all text is legible with all text being against a high contrast background.

Usability Testing

Findings:

Each person was able to navigate easily to the pages where they would complete each of the 3 tasks

Verbal Feedback:

One of the business owners shared that she tracks inventory on a separate Google sheet and that she knows several other vendors that do the same. She shared that currently, she spends her evenings cross checking sales and making sure that the totals of items sold across her etsy store and instagram sales line up to match the sales reflected in her Google sheet.