Role: Product Designer, Graphics Designer Duration: 12 Months
The Vasiti Wholesale Center is an extension of the Vasiti Marketplace which allows student entrepreneurs to buy goods in bulk and sell at retail prices on the Marketplace.
Vasiti.com aims to leverage e-commerce to improve socio-economic growth in Africa.
The Vasiti ecosystem is essential to student entrepreneurs as it helps them focus on their studies while managing their business very easily on the platform(s).
During the pandemic, 96% of businesses were directly impacted. Due to restricted movement around the country, it became more difficult for student entrepreneurs and other small businesses to procure/restock products.
We also decided to expand the service to other small and medium businesses since we knew it would benefit all businesses.
The stakeholders believed the idea was full-proof and profitable since they was already a similar model, so research wasn't a priority at that time.
However, we had some interviews with our sales team to understand the wholesalers’ behaviours, because they managed and connected directly with our wholesalers. We also sent out surveys to some of our customers on the Vasiti Marketplace to understand their shopping experiences during this time.
From our findings, we discovered that:
Digitizing the wholesaler’s stores was not difficult, we already had a working model on the Vasiti Marketplace, however, we had to cater for buying in larger quantities.