Yi-Ning's Note

Building an online marketplace, part 1

July 29, 2018 | 1 Minute Read

This is a long post about my approach to a project I am working on. It is more about product making, problem solving and technical direction. Please feel free to not read it if you’re not interested any of these.

Recently I started working on a project that help small online business owners to manage their orders and sell their products online.

  • These specific owners I worked with:
    • They does not have any automated process
    • They have a lot of unorganized excel spreadsheet
    • They manually enter their order into excel spreadsheet
    • They could use Shopify, but their customers are very tied to Facebook. The order is placed on Facebook via messages or response to a post.  
  • End goal:
    • Get their customers to place order online, and they can still place order in a way they are comfortable with
    • Helping the owner to easily manage their orders, building reports to help them understand their revenue 

My first step to the end goal is helping business owners manage their orders

  • Problem: I do not have the time and resource on building something similar to excel.
  • Solution: I am building an upload button for them to upload their spreadsheets. This way, the business owners do not need to wait for a long time to get benefit from the platform.

That’s all for now, I’ll keep update my progress.