2011 TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing winner, OrderWithMe, worked with theLIFT to help bring their user experience vision to life. Working closely with the founding team, we quickly dove into an immersive multi-day Discovery session on a mission to craft a new type of shopping experience for small business owners.
One of the primary goals was to mirror the offline buying process, without feeling too "E-commerce like." Much of the target audience was still using spreadsheets to place orders, simply because that was the quickest way to browse and shop for large quantities.
Our solution consisted of a "Shop" and "Back Room" format, giving owners a familiar feeling to their brick and mortar stores. The "Shop" allows users to toggle between two views (grid and list.) The grid view features a "work bar" under each product to quickly add or remove large quantities from the order before reviewing their final order. The list view mimics the efficiency of an Excel spreadsheet, allowing buyers to quickly scan and place orders without clicking through multiple pages.
The "Back Room" gives users access to all of their account management tools, including reviewing and tracking previous orders, updating their profile, billing, and shipping information.
In addition to the web application redesign, we also revamped the OrderWithMe home page in an effort to help tell the OrderWithMe story in a more engaging and informative style. We surfaced a variety of inventory to show users quality and pricing, and created a custom sign-up flow based on the users product preference.
About OrderWithMe OrderWithMe is a group buying system meant to help Western small business owners by dramatically simplifying the process of acquiring Chinese-made goods in bulk. By curating products and splitting orders, OrderWithMe allows shops to acquire any size shipment of these lower-priced goods, as opposed to the usual minimum order of 100+.