BACKSTORY
Marco is one of the biggest sellers of furniture on Gumtree and has posted close to 30 000 items over the past 2 years. That’s a lot of items! At every given time, there are hundreds of these items on his Gumtree profile.
As we talked to Marco and other entrepreneurs on Gumtree, 4 main problems started to emerge:
1. The IA of the template tool we had to work from was quite complex.
2. It’s quite laborious to upload 100's of items via the standard Post-Ad process on Gumtree.
3. There is no analytics to see how well different items are doing.
4. Boosting those many items becomes really expensive and time-consuming.
3. There is no analytics to see how well different items are doing.
4. Boosting those many items becomes really expensive and time-consuming.
Here’s how we approached and solved these problems.
1. SIMPLIFYING THINGS
Estate agents on Gumtree had the privilege to solve these kinds of problems for some time now already. So it was easy to borrow some of the solutions from there, but because the architecture of the property tool was so complicated, we wanted to simplify things first.
We used Google Sheets to map out and simplify the IA.
This enabled us to not only simplify the UI, but also improve the ease of navigating around and accomplishing entrepreneurs' tasks.
We went...
2. POSTING AN AD
Up until now, the entrepreneur had to manually go through the process of uploading stock via the Gumtree Post-Ad process. Uploading 1, 2 or even 5 stock items is still ok, but when you have a spreadsheet with 100's of stock items, then this becomes quite a tedious process.
Since most of this problem could be solved with some code magic, we didn't really have to design a lot of UI here.
The only bit we did design for this problem, was this first empty state of the onboarding experience:
3. GRAPHS!
What tool would be complete without graphs? We're quite averse to vanity metrics so we spent quite a lot of time talking to customers about what the most important metrics are to them. The 3 metrics that stood out most, were:
- Leads
- Listings & Views
- Stock Inventory
4. BOOST STOCK ITEMS
Boosting 100’s of ads on Gumtree can be quite expensive and time-consuming. We created the marketing section to enable entrepreneurs to easily buy new packages and boost ads in bulk. This streamlined selling stock on Gumtree considerably.
