Marketplace for the financial industry - proof of concept

Marketplace project

‍
The project was ambitious, both for us as an e-commerce agency and for our client. In the first phase, our client assumed the sale of about 100 thousand products and support for 2 thousand suppliers, while in the second phase the distribution of about 5 million products and support for 20 thousand suppliers was planned. Such a large project required us to carefully prepare the idea of technological infrastructure in order to provide an efficient, stable and secure sales system.

For our client, the main assumption was to develop the marketplace to a large scale in the future and create a service that would support 20 million products and several hundred thousand suppliers. From a business perspective, this required market verification of the whole idea and interest among potential users and the target group.

Preparing the proof of concept took us relatively little time, only 2 months. The work we did during this period:

• we conducted consulting in the form of workshops with the client, which allowed us to collect and analyze the client's business needs,
• we created a system architecture plan based on the best solutions available on the market,
• we prepared a comprehensive plan and schedule of activities (roadmap),
• we prepared the design and UX of the marketplace.

Marketplace architecture

‍
The architecture we prepared is based on microservices and uses solutions from the best providers, such as Magento (Adobe Commerce), Ergonode PIM and Mirakl.

• Magento - the leader among e-commerce platforms available on the market, which provides solutions for B2B and B2C brands
• Mirakl - a solution for marketplace automation, including vendor support, distributed order management, invoicing and more.
• Ergonode - a PIM (Product Information Management) system for product catalog management, allowing optimization and automation of handling large amounts of product data.

‍
Design & UX

‍
As part of the cooperation, we also prepared a proposal for the visual layer of the marketplace, which included style board, design of the homepage, product card, sales page of a given supplier and individual components of the site (e.g. navigation) and. All elements were adjusted to both desktop and mobile versions. When recommending solutions for our client, we relied on the heuristics described by the Baymard Institute in over 750 comprehensive guidelines with which our designers are familiar.

‍
Style board

We prepared mood boards which reflect the components of the system and translate them into the overall visual aspect of the project and emotions felt by the users (photographs, colors, interface components - buttons, icons, typeface, fonts).

‍
Advanced product card

The idea is that each product has 1 product card, where the user can browse the list of suppliers and choose the one that suits him best.

‍
Vendor page

Individual vendors have dedicated pages presenting their offer and a panel for adding products, offers and managing orders on their own.

Mobile first

While designing the platform, we focused primarily on the mobile first approach, i.e. building a positive shopping experience for users buying via smartphones or tablets. Thanks to this, using the website on mobile devices will be comfortable, and shopping will be pleasant and trouble-free.

‍
Advantages of our approach

• Scalable solution enabling a quick start within a few months with the option to grow the service up to 5 million SKUs.
• Architecture based on global market leaders such as Magento (Adobe Commerce), Miracl, Ergonode PIM.
• Proven architecture concept ready for business to scale horizontally and vertically.
• UX design created according to Baymard Insitute best practices and heuristics to make the marketplace platform usable and intuitive for users.
  ‍

Choose the top-notch  partner

‍
Check our offer of implementing marketplace systems for e-commerce.

‍