Social Commerce Ecosystem in “Bale”

✏️ Introduction

One of our goals in “Bale” was to create and strengthen the “social commerce” ecosystem, a goal which was aligned with our platform structure. In “Bale”, with 10 million monthly active users and infrastructures such as “channels”, “groups” and various financial features, we believe addressing social commerce as one of the opportunities for business growth and value creation for the user. This action would create good value for retailers as one of the key stakeholders in this issue; A society that generally does not have a strong financial foundation and has a lot of instability in their business. On the other hand, with shopping on the platform of social commerce, customers as another key beneficiaries, have more variety than shopping in person or online, and in general, the price on this platform is cheaper than the mentioned platforms. Also, For business, by establishing communities of customers and sellers and creating value for both, we directly affected the rate of attraction and retention.

🛒 What is social commerce?

To continue this case study, we need to know a basic definition of “social commerce”. Buying and selling goods and services on the platform of social networks, is known as “social commerce”. These types of businesses are generally focused on the direct interaction of buyers and sellers and the presence of small businesses.

social commerce was one of our most significant actions and products in “Bale” banking messenger in 2022, which brought us good results in different aspects of business.

🙋🏻‍♂ My Role as a Product Designer

• To help clarify the issues of sellers and customers
• Providing solutions in line with the needs of sellers, customers and business according to the infrastructure and features available in different sales steps such as supply, interaction, trust creation and payment.
• To design product solutions to create a community of shopkeepers and activate them as effective nodes.
• Providing product solutions to help artificial intelligence join the “Bale” store.
• Focusing on increasing the “retention” rate and “time in shop” by potential and actual customers

After the meeting with the employers and checking the needs, concerns and defining the goals of social commerce, we started discovering and checking the issue.

😁 What is exactly the topic to be discussed?

To start discovering and clarifying the problem, I did a series of secondary research in order to understand the keyword “social commerce” and its difference with other keywords such as “e-commerce” and “social selling”. I also checked the situation of this field in Iran and other countries. I used the data available on some sites like Statistics, NNG, Paersian TechRasa, etc. and the result was that social commerce is a growing topic in the world and in Iran, and different domestic and foreign platforms have taken different measures about it. Instagram and WeChat are among the most active apps in this field, but it’s not limited to these two platforms. The other thing that was done in this research was the examination of subject classification. Well, clothing, especially women’s clothing, was one of the most widely supplied and demanded categories, and women were more involved than men in both sales and purchases. Cosmetics and accessories were next.

🌏 How about the market? What are competitors doing?

In the next step, we examined foreign competitors such as Instagram, WeChat, Tyro and domestic competitors, some of which were newfangled and some were older in this field in different aspects such as their various features, their information architecture, artificial intelligence performance, etc.

Up to that point, we had obtained good information and the subject and problem were more coherent in our minds.

❤️ Empathy with Sellers

Now we had to go to the retail sellers working in this field to hear their pain points, concerns and possibly ideas. For this, we went to people who had already created channels to sell their products in “Bale”; and our assumption was that they were active on other platforms besides “Bale”, which was true.

We tried to discover both the requirements in “Bale” and the problems outside it. In this process, we found that the following are considerable concerns for social commerce sellers and “Bale” sellers:

• They consider their position to be unstable and have no financial support
• They have to spend a lot of money and put more effort for their growth
• Their income doesn’t match the amount of effort they make
• They have to put a lot of energy to set up trust
• They get into trouble due to some functional problems in messaging
• To work effectively in “Bale”, they need a series of new features
• …

Also, they had interesting ideas to solve their pain points, which I just wrote down so that I can go to them at the proper time.

According to previous experiences, I tried to conduct the interviews intensively. Approximately 6 interviews per day, with a total of 18 sellers interviewed, and the time it took me to conduct these interviews along with documentation was 3 days. It took 1 day to sort, analyze, conclude and explain the initial proposal of measures; 4 days in total.

So why intensive? Because when this process is prolonged, it reduces the concentration for other actions and causes erosion in mind. Also, in agile development, we need to build our hypothesis quickly. It also helps that there is not a long gap between the interviews and their analysis for each interview and at the end of all the interviews and that the analysis is more accurate.

I would like to add that after this research, we had obtained some information about the needs and concerns of the customers and we did not need more information at this stage.

🕙 It was time to tell what I did

In a meeting, I presented this process and the results of research and analysis to the business stakeholders. I tried to have all stakeholders present in this meeting because the obtained insights and results were so important in drawing the road map. The manager and owner of the product, senior product manager, business developer, senior product designer, data analyst, and marketing manager took part in this meeting and we discussed and decided on the next decisions and actions.

It was presented to the social commerce product team in another meeting. Of course, with less detail.

According to research and experience, presenting the results of research and interviews to the product team, even briefly, significantly makes the team members engaged with the product and their work.

As a result of this research, the persona and segment were determined and this was a good point to pass the problem and enter the solution space.

Generally, the result of these actions was that we had to formalize the social commerce and the buying and selling platform in “Bale’’ so that a platform was made for more serious activity of current sellers and the entry of new sellers, and also users recognize the subject of selling various goods and services in “Bale”. We also provided solutions for the pain points of hard growth, trust creation, fraud and interaction, which were among the most important and prominent pain points both in “Bale ‘’ and in other platforms.

💡 Let’s go to ideas to solve the problems of our dear users

Regarding the clarity of the problem space, it was time to start brainstorming in line with the discovered problems and business needs. The results of brainstorming by the strategist team and the social commerce product team were as follows:

• Set up “Bale” shop with different categories in order to help with the problem of store visibility and creating trust. In the initial step, we used the structure of the “Showcase” section that already existed, with a few minor changes, which brought down the cost of design and development for initial measurements.
• We presented the “money request” feature that was already present in “Bale” as a “secure payment solution” in the seller service section, which greatly improved the pain point of creating trust and payment fraud.
• Customization of “Official Bale Ads” for store owners in order to improve the pain point of “growth”
• Providing “microloans” in cooperation with Bank Melli Iran with the aim of providing financial aid for small businesses

💨 Smoke Test

One of the value propositions that we considered for shopkeepers was “microloans” which would create a high value for shopkeepers based on our hypothesis. By placing the relevant button in the seller services section, based on the usability test and the number of clicks after the launch, we came to the conclusion that it was eye catching, this feature did not create significant value for shopkeepers and they do not show interest in it.

According to the results of the interview that the need for growth among shopkeepers was very strong, as well as the effect that advertisements had on the growth of users, and also the high cost of advertising for small business owners, we decided to provide this facility to shopkeepers under advertisements; that is, a value called “credit advertisements” that shopkeepers would order advertisements and pay for them later.

But this time, we decided to use the “Smoke Test” tool to initially measure users’ interest in this service before implementing and verifying the flow of this service. We created a landing page centered on this topic and a registration button; users were transferred to a section where they had to enter a series of information, and after sending the information, they received a message about checking the information and initial validation. Out of about 8,000 landing page entries, about 3,000 people applied for registration within a month. The conversion rate was about 40%. Out of this number of registrations, beside the weaknesses of the landing page, we found that users significantly showed more interest in this value, and this led us to follow-up and finalize this service with external relations.

The result we saw after the final release was in accordance with the test results, and due to the network effect regarding the impact of this type of advertising, many sellers wanted this facility. Based on the self-declaration of the sellers and the observation we made, the “Bale” official advertisements were really effective for them in terms of the growth of the number of members and orders, and by using “credit advertisements”, a larger number of sellers could register their advertisement orders and make use of it.

🔁 What did we do after presenting the first version?

1. Improving the Retention Rate and Time in Shop

After presenting the initial version and observing various metrics, we realized that Time In Shop and Retention are low! According to the review of the feedback and the usability test, we realized that the findability is low due to problems in the information architecture, and also the users who clearly knew what product they were looking for, found it with difficulty. To solve this problem, we improved the information architecture of the page and also developed the search feature and the subject category for the store.

One of the most important measures we took in order to improve these two metrics was artificial intelligence and the introduction of the “Recommender System” in the store. This action was done with the direct cooperation of the “data team”. Product actions on Recommender system had its own complexities and details that require a separate case study.

2. Facilitating purchase and interaction between customer and seller

Based on feedback and reviews, due to the difficulty of the customer and seller interaction process regarding a specific product, we made changes in the product posts and personalized this type of message in the store channels in order to create distinction between normal and product posts and also by creating a suitable button, it would be easier to communicate with the seller and talk about a specific product. On the other hand, if the parties reach an agreement, customers can complete the purchase and payment process at the same stage using the “money request” feature much faster than before. The name of this feature was “product post”.

3. Fixing the problem of products visibility

As I mentioned at the beginning of this case study, because there were some limitations on the business side, we tried to meet the needs of customers and shopkeepers as much as possible on the existing structure and features. One of these existing infrastructures were channels. In fact, the stores were “Bale ‘’ channels, but one of the pain points of the sellers was that the messages of the channels are too long and it makes the released products to be sidelined and not seen, or at least harder to see.

On the other hand, changing the logic of the chat page and adding a new layout to solve this problem would bring a lot of technical cost. With the benchmark and the brainstorming we did in this regard, we decided to put a FAB Button on the chat page by which we entered the shared media space of the channel. In this section, instead of seeing the explanatory texts, we only saw the images of the product posts and by clicking on each one, we entered the related post in the channel and could see the explanations. The name of this feature was “product display”.

4. Creating Shopkeepers Group

In order to interact with sellers directly and get continuous feedback from them, we formed a group in “Bale” called “Storekeepers Group”. In this group, “Bale” sellers were in direct contact with developers. How useful it was for us. Think of a group where key stakeholders are present and actively give different feedback about different aspects. From these feedbacks, we got very valuable insights about needs, and concerns. Also, the ideas they put forward were sometimes effective. I recommend creating such communities :)

✌️ What did it bring us?

• The presence of about 15,000 active stores in the store tab after 9 months. This was around 300 stores before addressing the issue of social commerce.
• Creating a community of 1,500 Loyal sellers as effective nodes on the platform
• Strengthening the hooks that increase the retention rate of users
• Helping the growth and prosperity of many small businesses after the restrictions of year 2022