LocalBizz — Product Case Study
LocalBizz is a product conception created during @productbuds Project Jam Protothon to bridge the gap around discoverability and trust of small businesses to increase users’s inclination to shop and support small businesses.
Overview
While local businesses strengthen and enrich our community, they now face unprecedented challenges keeping their business running since COVID-19. In a survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau, around 45% of small businesses reported being “largely negatively affected” by the pandemic, and around 40% reported being “moderately negatively affected” from April to October. People want to support local small businesses, as a study by Red Egg Marketing reveals that as much as 82% of shoppers will pay more to support small businesses. And Google Trends results show that the interest over time for “small business” increased 300% in April.
The Problem
With the holiday season around the corner, consumers predominantly drift to shop on notable e-commerce sites, like Amazon. While people do want to support local business, there are several reasons why they hesitate. According to our survey, people complain about the inconvenience when shopping from small businesses — either they don’t know how to start, don’t have time to look into each business, don’t know who to trust, find current websites to be oversaturated with information, find them expensive, and overall inconvenient. Using customer interviews, we identified that these pain points stem from the difficulty they face to explore business they like and build trusted relationships. By solving for this problem space, we can alleviate the other concerns that also arise.
This is why we would like to introduce our product, LocalBizz that alerts users weekly on small businesses in their area they should try out. Users can navigate to our website using their phone to take a simple quiz that will return tailored recommendations that are verified by trusted sources based on their interests. This allows users to establish trust with small business and make easier, smarter and quicker shopping decisions.
Goal
By solving the problem around discoverability and trust with small businesses, we can increase consumer support and satisfaction to make purchases from small businesses.
Understanding our User Demographics
When considering our problem space and goal to increase consumer support and satisfaction to shop small businesses, we can look at the following user segments:
- Online Shopper
- Small Business Owners
- Influencers
The shopping experience from the shopper lens is a great user group to focus on because based on a survey, we found that 63% of users opted for an e-commerce site like Amazon because the process is seamless. If we look into the small business owners and influencers perspective to raise more awareness, there are a lot of resources already available in the market. Many online articles, local directories, and influencers use social media tools to garner reviews and build presence around small businesses already. To avoid further over saturating that segment, we decided to further explore the online shopper user segment.
Through user interviews, we discovered the following:
- 40% of shoppers did not know where to start or didn’t have time to look for small businesses
- 53% of shoppers found that the process was too cumbersome and opted for Amazon or other online retailer because it was easier and more convenient
From this sample set of data that we gathered, we came to the conclusion that there’s a large need to simplify the user experience in choosing a small business to make a purchase from. Doing so will make shopping small businesses more discoverable and convenient which will support our goal in increasing awareness and encouraging consumers to shop small.
User Personas
As a doctor working sporadic shifts, Adam does not have a lot of time on his hands to find a small business to purchase from. Without product reviews or trusted information, Adam struggles to make a quick purchase decision.
Jane enjoys testing out new products in the market, you can always find her at Sephora. But, she find it difficult to invest or support a local small business because it is very time consuming and if friend of hers hasn’t recommended the brand, she rather save her money.
Use Cases
With these personas, we identified the current user journey for shopping small businesses from the time a user searches for one till purchase.
Taking these factors into account, we conclude there are three strong pain points present:
Discoverability
- Users spend a lot of time doing research to identify a business based on their interest if they are looking to shop from a small business.
Trust
- Users spend more time researching small businesses because there is less information availability relative to popular e-commerce sites (Amazon).
Tailored Recommendations
- Small businesses vary in selections and price range making it difficult to choose a business at a first glance.
Solution Ideation
We identified the problem area, our targeted user, and the user pain points and thus, we began thinking about what can we build to solve this problem. We brainstormed three solutions and created the following matrix to understand the pros and cons of each.
Based on our table above, we find that solution #1 solves for the discoverability and tailored recommendations piece but falls short on trust.
On the other hand, solution #2 does great in tackling the trust piece but for the medium level of effort, there is a lot of risk involved with acquiring and engaging users that can go wrong.
This leads us to solution #3 where we find that all three pain points are solved with a medium level of effort. There is concern around the verification piece and we aim to solve this by referencing trusted sources (news articles, Yelp reviews, etc.). In the event, we do not find pre-existing verified sources to support the business, we will have our own verification process to vet the business.
We chose solution #3 as opposed to the others because it alleviates our users’ pain points and provides a continued discoverability experience while the others are one-timers. This option brings the most value in our goal to increase shoppers’ support and satisfaction.
Minimum Viable Product
For our MVP, we generated the following user stories:
- As a user, I’d like to receive business recommendations by category when I search for a product to make a quick decision on where to make my product purchase.
- As a user, I’d like to receive business recommendations based on my preferences (quiz results) to find new businesses to support that I can trust and suit my taste.
- As a user, I’d like to receive weekly text updates on my tailored business recommendations to remind me that I should shop small.
- As a user, I’d like to see a verification of small business so I know my money is being well-spent.
- As a user, I’d like to share whether I liked the business provided with a thumbs up user approval to show my appreciation of the business and platform.
- As a user, I’d like to share my business recommendation results on social media to compare results with friends and family.
These stories represent the core functionality to solve for the problem we defined earlier. The mockup in the next section showcases the user journey for LocalBizz that is designed to:
- Improve discoverability by simplifying the entry point and making it more fun and accessible via a quiz
- Alleviate concerns around trust with user likes and verification checks
- Reduce the level of effort users previously spent to do research
Design Mockup
After the landing page, the user is prompted the first question inquiring whether they have a product in mind they would like to purchase. This prompts two possible paths:
When selecting “yes”, the user is prompted to answer what product they are looking for and details around the product to provide tailored recommendations based on their responses. A couple of design callouts on the list of businesses panel here:
- Categories (“Best Overall”, “Best for Quick Shipping”, etc.): Equips the user the ability to quickly decide what business to check out first based on their priority (User Story #1,2)
- User Likes (Thumbs Up): Emphasizes how many users from our platform enjoy and support this business which can be eye-catching to users when comparing options and garner trust (User Story #5)
- Verified By: Informs the user how the small business was verified and why it is trustworthy by referencing external trusted sources like Yelp and ABC7 (User Story #4)
In the “no” path, the user answers more personal interest related questions (note: more questions would be included in this path, but are not included in the mock up at this time of the protothon). Similar to the “yes” path, a list of businesses is provided and the notable difference is that instead of categories, we have the topics for the business recommendation. This indicates to the user why that particular business is suggested to them.
Upon receiving their quiz results a.k.a. business recommendations, the user can opt in to receive weekly text alerts and share their results amidst their friends (User Story #6). The text alert reminds the user about small businesses to check out and includes hyperlinks to prompt the user to explore and make purchases from those shops if desired (User Story #3).
Success Metrics
Keeping our goal in mind, the following two metrics are the primary focus:
User Engagement
% of users opting in for weekly text alerts
- The increase in user’s subscribing to text alerts will increase consumers’ interaction with small businesses and eventually lead to purchases.
Number of thumbs up user rating
- This gives a clear indication of whether our users enjoy the businesses that we recommend and goes back to our goal of improving consumer satisfaction.
User engagement is an extremely important metric because it informs us on how our users behave in response to recommendations and this will feed into us accomplishing our goal.
User Retention
Weekly user return rate (How many users return on a weekly basis?)
- Users engaging with text alerts and clicking on business links from our site shows user interest that they want to potentially purchase from businesses.
We can validate improvements in discoverability as well as trust that go back towards our goal to increase shopper’s support and satisfaction, as users continue to return to the platform.
Targeting these metrics allows to observe the rate at which more businesses are discovered and promoted which works toward our goal of increasing consumer support towards small businesses.
Looking Ahead
As for development of our MVP, we are still in the midst of gathering additional business verification and data to back up our solve for the trust pain point. We’d also like to spend more time thinking about the technical implementation to ensure that LocalBizz will function as we intended. Once this is done, we can start thinking about building our product.
In addition to the MVP, we also considered potential opportunities to partner with businesses to host joint virtual events, incorporate affiliate links, and/or create group discounts/e-gift cards directly on our site. Pursuing these ventures will be dependent on our MVP performance.
Overall, this case study highlighted that despite trending, the gap between shoppers purchasing from small businesses is largely due to trust and discoverability. That is why we believe LocalBizz will play a huge role in increasing support for small businesses amidst online shoppers.
LocalBizz earned 1st place at the Project Jam Protothon, organized by @productbuds (11/13/2020 – 11/15/2020). The theme for this protothon was, “The New Normal” and it invited participants to innovate a product/service to help people adapt to this new normal.
Team: Ami Patel, Sophia Xu, Elizabeth Song
Special thanks to our mentor, Caitlyn Lubas, for supporting and guiding us through.
If you have any feedback, questions, or concerns regarding LocalBizz, feel free to contact me (Ami Patel) via LinkedIn.
Sources:
Google Trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=small%20business&geo=US
Haileyesus, Samson. “82% Of Shoppers Will Pay More Now to Support Small Businesses.” Smallbiztrends, 4 Aug. 2020, https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/08/red-egg-marketing-local-business-survey.html.
“Small Business Pulse Survey.” Small Business Pulse Survey Data, United States Census Bureau, 2020, https://portal.census.gov/pulse/data/#weekly.
