About Faire

Faire is a curated boutique wholesale digital marketplace dedicated to connecting over 60,000 retailers (last time I checked) with thousands of emerging and established brands.

With Faire, local businesses stock their shops with unique items guaranteed to sell, or they may return them for free with risk-free terms. Independent makers have access to tools and resources to get discovered by potential customers across the country, and to grow their wholesale business through Faire.

Insights

Before launching this feature, makers had no way of running promotions or discounts on their Faire shop. As a result, they would take orders off the platform, causing disintermediation and thereby decreasing our share of wallet (SOW).

Additionally, the lack of price parity made Faire the more expensive platform for retailers to shop on. These factors made the promotions feature an increasingly important value to Faire's makers.

Approach

The promotions feature had gone through a number of design iterations and reviews in 2018, but was de-prioritized due to lack of resources and higher-priority features needed at the time. As the company focused more resources in 2019 on increasing maker value and reducing disintermediation, the promotions feature found its wings.

I led product design for this feature across both the maker portal and retailer site, partnering with a product manager and a handful of engineers from web, iOS, and Android teams.

Our measurements for success were to:

• Increase SOW and GMV

• Increase order conversion

• Reduce disintermediation

Solutions Part One:
The Maker Portal

Integrating promotions into the Maker Portal involved a shift in navigation, cohesion with the design system in place, and the creation of new components to suit the needs of makers.

The most challenging part of designing this new feature was accounting for the following three constraints in place for the MVP:

• Three types of discounts: % off, $ off, and free shipping

• The ability to run only one promotion at a time

• Promotions applied to a maker's entire Faire shop

Solutions Part Two
The Retailer Experience

In order for retailers to discover makers running promotions, we decided to indicate them in three key areas of the shopping experience:

1. A dedicated homepage carousel (high traffic content)

2. The maker profile page + open cart

3. The lefthand filter bar on search and category pages

Additional challenges to this part of the project included the application across responsive web, iOS, and Android screens, as well as throughout the checkout flows, email correspondence, and the orders and invoicing flows.