Creating B2B personas and identifying opportunities: The case of a dropshipping solution

The largest textile industry of the Americas wanted to increase their sales by offering a dropshipping solution to retail partners

Year: 2021

Role: Product designer / UX Researcher

Discipline: UX Research

Industry: Retail

Background

This was a project for a textile industry that had their own B2C stores and e-commerce, but wanted to increase their sales in the B2B market - targeting retailers who resell their products.

Goal

I was working in the company as the only UX Researcher & Service Designer in the B2B team.

The company wanted to strengthen the B2B channel, which was hardly affected by the pandemic, by offering a dropshipping solution for small and medium size retailers. They believed that the dropshipping could benefit retailers who didn't have enough resources to invest in stock, storage and delivery logistics.

My mission was to identify opportunities for the B2B team and understand what would be valuable for retailers.

Methods

- Research: the only data that we had about the retailers was a list with more than 6,000 e-mails. So I decided to first do an online survey in order to get more information about the contacts and try to recruit participants for interviews. Although the response rate was very low (only 3%) I was able to focus on 150 retailers and get a sense of their profiles (based on social media activity and the survey answers).

Then, I interviewed 10 retailers remotely via phone call, since most of them didn't have access to computer.

- Personas: based on the data that I was able to get from the research, I developed personas. The personas represented each retailer profile which I was able to identify during the research. I grouped them by their business size, tech literacy, selling channels, annual revenue, their needs and pain points.

- Opportunities Map: after analyzing and clustering each persona necessities, I was able to converge into 8 macro opportunities for the business. These opportunities were categorized and detailed through an opportunities map.

- Prototyping: opportunities were presented to the product and business team. We defined how would be our dropshipping solution and the product strategy together. Then, I developed wireframes and a medium fidelity interactive prototype that can be seen in the video below.

Mural of the process.

Simulation of one early prototype (in Portuguese).

- Usability Testing: I tested the prototype with 13 retailers. The goal was not only to test its interactions, but also the whole concept of the solution.

Outcomes

This project was a major success within the company and B2B retail partners. It was impressive to see how much we were able to know and develop with such a limited number of resources and data sources, especially considering that in the beginning of the project we didn't know anything about the retailers.

Along with the Product Owner and the Dev team, we defined how the MVP of the solution was going to be. We also created the roadmap for features.

The solution was implemented and used not only by B2B retailers, but also by B2C stores.