Rareup.com eCommerce Platform Case Study
An idea birthed from the coronavirus.
Introduction:
Back-End developer: Marcus Andersson
UX Designer: Jack Thomas
Rareup.com is a company founded in Gothenburg 2019 by Marcus Andersson as a simple e-Commerce Website Builder, but the idea grew into something much more relevant and much more targeted.
After the coronavirus hit, a lot of high street shop owners started heavily investing in their online presence, realising that they are at risk of going under without it.
Brief:
To create a simple way for the general, small time shop owner to get online and start selling their products a quickly as possible, either through creating a shop or linking a centralised checkout system.
The Rareup.com mission is to make e-Commerce fun, exciting and easy.
Target Audience:
Shop Owners, Start-up Sellers, Influencers/Merch sellers
Restraints:
Set up must be quick (no more than 10mins)
Must include a checkout system built into the product.
No credit card sign up is allowed.
No 30-day free trial is allowed.
UI must be intuitive, and require no learning curve/instructions.
Discovery and Market Research
With the brief set, we started by looking for direct and passive competitors, we knew that we were entering a very competitive market place. As the list of website builders alone was longer than we can list here. Here’s just a few…
Direct:
Wix.com
Weebly.com
Godaddy.com
Shopify.com
Squarespace.com
Site123.com
Zyro.com
Jimdo.com
Heyleia.com
Passive:
Webflow.com
Wordpress.com
Facebook.com
Instagram.com
Ebay.com
Amazon.com
To say this is a competitive market place is an understatement.
But there is always room for improvement, current models of website builders are generally step by step, AI lead or questions an answer set ups.
Some are very intuitive but yield poor results, notable mention heyleia.com, but most have a steep learning curve for the average (non-digital) user.
User Research
I wanted to test the minimum information we would need by creating the most common design language used on a website builder and testing it on a small group of shop owners and reviewing the different onboarding steps.
The 4 steps of information gathering I decided on as absolutely necessary where as follows: Name of the users shop, a description, a logo and an background/cover image.
Users wanted some form of customisable input right away as long as it can be easily edited after the onboarding.
So I knew the minimum amount of information needed, now I need to give them a reason to use Rareup.com. What was the difference? Why would users keep coming back to this product.
Key user insight: Adding products seems complicated
The Product — A new take
After a few iterations, we played with different options for our product. Modular item cards, Gamification, Goal tracking, Holiday themes were all ideas worth exploring. but we still didn’t have the correct foundations.
One day I was doing some research on facebook market place and finally a lightbulb went off in my head. Social Media is the answer.
“We should create the social media of eCommerce”
A system where you sign up, upload a cover photo and a logo, add some products and you’re off... Thats what users want.
Its a one size fits all solution for a shop owners looking to get online quickly and without the headache of a sign up fee or trial, but how do we monetize it? make it completely free until you start selling.
Also you have the option to connect the centralised checkout system to you facebook marketplace.
we are giving the user options.
Two User Groups
“Shop owners” and “Customers”
Shop Owners have full control of their profile or “shop” and can upgrade thing on it like product slots (you start with 8) or they can purchase themes for their shop like Christmas themes or Halloween themes.
Customers make product purchases through a Stripe powered checkout where 3% gets. taken from each transaction. 1% to Stripe 2% to Rareup.com
To achieve this I have connected with Stripe and created a master account which shop owners will attach to so there is no need for them to sign up for Stripe themselves (no-one is take away from the Rareup.com experience)
Next Steps: the product is currently under development we are repeatedly testing and refining the prototype and gaining further insights.
Please feel free to view the demo here
