While Malaysia was under quarantine during COVID-19, StoreHub had an influx of food & beverage merchants who onboarded to use Beep Delivery, a new food delivery platform launched in late March 2020.

Very quickly, StoreHub‘s Customer Success team struggled with onboarding the increased number of merchants, especially with uploading product information and setting up the menu to be available online. StoreHub quickly decided that it would help to upload menus for merchants.

Struggling with the bulk

Currently, in the system, merchants had a way to update their products by using the bulk upload feature via CSV; however, there were certain parts of the added products that were not supported by bulk uploads:

• Multiple-choice variants (a way that allows cashiers and customers to select more than one add-on to their dish, for instance, Bubble Tea toppings) had to be uploaded manually and could not be bulk-uploaded
• Merchants would have to repeat uploading these multiple-choice variants for every single product — there was no way to duplicate a product, and it had to be done manually

Initially, when I got the general brief, the product manager and I thought we could make it simple by allowing multiple-choice variants to be managed at a central place and then allowing products to be connected to it.

However, after a while, we realized that it would be better to take this opportunity to revamp entirely the way merchants added their products. The timing seemed to be perfect because we were also in the midst of revamping the BackOffice to fix it, section by section. The BackOffice is behind the scenes for merchants to add and edit products, manage inventory, access reports, and more.

Finding the issues

This is currently how merchants add or edit products in the BackOffice:

In the beginning, I started documenting everything — from assumptions to existing features and behaviors:

Next, I started digging through all requests from merchants regarding products from a few sources:

1. Feedback with Pendo
   Merchants could send in feature requests and vote on features they’d like. There were 50 product requests related to adding products from here
2. Support tickets from PlanHat
   Almost all support touchpoints are collated in PlanHat, whether email or phone calls. Due to the high volume of this channel, I only went through one month’s worth of support tickets to pull out all the relevant issues merchants had. There were roughly about 37 issues/requests from PlanHat
3. Chat logs via Zendesk
   These chat logs were usually from all the different apps’ support channels — which also had numerous chat logs, so similar to the above, I went through only one month’s worth of logs. Thankfully there were only 9 issues that merchants faced with products via this channel

We then split all the issues up based on the different fields in the Products section to easily refer to each field when trying to zero in on an issue.

Competitor analysis

After the initial documentation, I started deep-diving into our competitors to see how they were doing things and get ideas on the landscape.

The competitors I looked into were:

• Square Up
• Vend
• Shopify
• Lightspeed Retail + Ecommerce
• Lightspeed F&B
• Lightspeed Ecommerce
• Shopkeep
• Wongnai

This research proved to be very useful to help the team figure out the motivations behind why these point-of-sale companies did certain things. It ultimately helped us decide what we were going to do, even if it meant changing the core concepts of adding products.

Redesigning the whole add/edit products

After much sweat and tears, we ended up with this version to start testing with internal trainers, onboarding specialists, and external merchants.

The major things that changed were:

1. How retail and F&B merchants created their products is now separated
   Retail merchants would most likely create variants, which would generate child products with inventory tracking turned on. F&B merchants would create modifiers instead, which do not track any inventory but allow customers to select options.
   Previously, merchants would need to think about whether their variants were single choice or multiple choice, then decide if they’d want to track the inventory (for single choice variants only)
   
2. Modifiers can now be managed in a centralized place, then be attached to each product
   Modifiers were the main reason the whole revamp started anyway. Now it would be easy for merchants to add all sorts of modifiers in their system, such as ice cream toppings, bubble tea toppings or sweetness levels, sizes of a dish, or even poke bowl ingredients.
   
3. Online product settings will be merged with general product settings
   With more and more merchants coming online anyway, this made a lot of sense. Also, merchants tend to forget whether a specific product has descriptions and would have to click into another tab to check constantly

Test, test, test!

Because this was the core of everything we did in StoreHub, we decided to carefully test extensively before moving on to the development phase.

Our goals were to:

• Evaluate merchant’s understanding of the concept of variants vs. modifiers
• See if merchants could understand that all these settings can be used for online channels
• Ensure that merchants can recreate their existing products and have workarounds to create any form of complicated products

The method of testing was to prototype and do individual user testing with a slew of people:

1. 5 internal trainers
2. A mom and pop single restaurant
3. An ice cream parlour with 5 stores
4. A retail fashion store which also sells online
5. A warehousing business specializing in dental equipment
6. A giant dessert franchise with 92 stores Malaysia-wide
7. A service-based store (school, facial, car workshop etc.)
8. An external retail store
9. An external restaurant that serves Italian courses

After researching merchants and seeing which products to pick to try and recreate in the new interface, I came up with a bunch of questions to ask that were relevant to their business.

In total, we did about 9 out of 13 tests, and while some things will have to be fixed, in general, most merchants love the new concept of variants and modifiers and can’t wait to use it for their business.

Post that, I documented exactly what needed to be fixed, and questions to ponder for the broader group of product managers and our CTO/development team to see how to address suggestions or come up with ideas to fix some issues.

These enhancements aimed to streamline the product addition process, significantly reducing the time merchants spent managing their inventory. By prioritizing user feedback and embracing an iterative approach, the goal was to create a seamless experience that empowered merchants to focus on what truly mattered — delivering exceptional value to their customers