PreciousPlastic

bazar.preciousplastic.com

A marketplace on a mission to reduce plastic waste

Business Area:

Equipment
Furniture
Glasses
Shredders
Extruders
Sheet presses
Moulds
Recycled plastic furniture
Recycled plastic household items
Recycled plastic lighting
Recycled plastic art pieces
Recycled plastic accessories

Services:

Location:

Netherlands

Challenge

Simplify vendor panels for better onboarding

Implementing the Project

Precious Plastic is a project launched in the Netherlands in 2013 by Dave Hakkens, a designer who was just finishing his degree at that time. The aim of the project was to encourage people to recycle plastic into useful things like furniture, lighting, art pieces or accessories. The platform was built as a community to help the recycling activists to share their experience, drawings, mockups, and ideas with the fellow-minded guys to grow the eco-aware movement. Since 2013, the platform evolved into an open source platform and became a huge community with over 40,000 plastic recyclers around the world.

In 2016, Precious Plastic started building their marketplace to sell extruders, moulds, and products made of plastic to DIY designers and regular buyers. They chose the Multi-Vendor platform for their C2C project and customized it with us to make a good fit for their conscious audience. The marketplace allows individual buyers to set up “their own miniature recycling company”.

Vendor panel simplification

Simplification of the product creation page in the vendor panel was the top-priority task to allow vendors who are mostly individual customers to easily create a product. The concept was to build an Etsy-like one-pager where you can once enter all the settings and not return to it anymore. The vendor there is almost like a customer. When such a customer enters the site and then registers as a vendor, he or she can start selling. As an individual, such a buyer needs to create and sell a product easily. Therefore, the request was to simplify the vendor panel, so that the new vendor could quickly navigate in the dashboard and start working with the products without the hassle.

Simple shipping rates

By default, the Multi-Vendor has a calculator that calculates the cost of delivery depending on the service (DHL, USPS, etc). But for this project, it was decided to make this scheme as simple as ABC. We introduced two regions for domestic and international shipping. Now the shipping cost depends on the country and not on the shipping service. The vendor himself/herself decides what the shipping cost would be depending on the region. For example, if the vendor and the buyer are in the same country, then the cost in the home region is fixed. If a vendor needs to deliver to a country other than his/her domestic country, as in the case of international delivery, a different fixed price is set. This shipping cost scheme is straightforward and clear for newbies.

Grouping countries by region

This task is closely related to shipping regions. Grouping countries by region allows quick defining what region a country belongs to. We added an ability to set a priority to a country when an exception needs to be introduced. For example, the vendor region is Europe, and for Europe as for the domestic region the vendor has a fixed shipping cost. However, for some reason the vendor wants to set a different shipping cost for Germany belonging to the European region. In this case, a prioritization system allows setting a different price as this rule would have a higher priority in settings.

The priority is the order in which the script takes the rate area and matches it to the customer location. For example, 1 is a higher priority than 10; 0 is the highest priority. The priority is set for a particular country and it prevails over the rules in force for a particular region.

Stripe Connect modification

By default, it is not intuitively clear that you need to have a Stripe Connect account to start selling. A new vendor, creating products, may not understand that it is necessary to register with Stripe. We introduced such a logic where the first mandatory step for the vendor is to create an account in Stripe, and only then the function of adding a product becomes available.

The “Add product” button is inactive until Stripe is connected. On hovering it, a text appears: “In order to create a listing, you need to set up a Stripe account first.” After Stripe is set up, the ability to add a product comes up.

For vendors who have not added any products, we replaced the “No data found” text with “In order to create your first listing, please add your Payment setup first”.

With this modification, vendors now have to register with Stripe first and then only start selling on the platform. It allows avoiding the cases when a vendor sells without payment setup.

Attaching files to messages in Real-Time Messenger

We expanded the Real-Time Messenger functionality with an ability to attach images. Users now can add PDF, JPEG, PNG files to their messages. An awesome feature for DIY designers to share mockups and other product-related files.

Seller's country and name on a product

We added the vendor’s name and vendor’s country to the category and search results pages. The vendor’s name is shown above the product’s name and the vendor’s country is displayed below the product name. Customers won’t lose sight of the vendor as it is always displayed along with the product.

Results

A vendor-friendly C2C site with an easy onboarding of new sellers.

“Their ability to respond quickly and to develop very specific requirements impressed us”.

Joseph Klatt

Marketplace Manager in his interview with Clutch