China product sourcing requests

Task

The goal was to improve purchasing from China on two levels:

• For clients: improve the form for requesting a product search in China
• For the business: move buyers' work from scattered Excel spreadsheets into a single CRM to speed up order processing.

The main challenge was to build a tool flexible enough for non-⁠standard cases, yet structured enough for CRM automations and request analytics later on

Process

I analyzed existing research on the storefront and interviewed future CRM users — buyers and sales managers. The critical problems I found:

Storefront:

1. Users often looked for products that were already in the catalog
2. 25% of requests lacked details and needed follow-⁠up calls
3. 70% of users sent products in batches, though the interface allowed only one at a time

How internal teams worked:

1. Staff used several spreadsheets to handle requests. One was the main list of requests. Another was for comments. Yet another was for edits
2. Requests kept bouncing between buyers and sales
3. Buyers filled in a special Excel file for suppliers, in a strict format and in Chinese. Then they waited until there were “enough” products to search for, to send everything to a particular supplier

What I did

• Gathered hypotheses, user stories and a service blueprint (as-⁠is and to-⁠be) to visualize the business process and see how it passes between parties
• Built the data model and a BPMN diagram (with an analyst) to design the CRM.
• Ran a series of usability tests on prototypes with buyers and the purchasing team

Solution

Storefront (client journey):

• Added product recognition at the photo upload step. If the product is already in the database, the system offers to open its page instead of creating a request
• Reworked the required fields. Users could no longer send an “empty” request, which removed the extra clarification step
• Made it possible to request several products at once
• Added an “exclusive product” option (not published to the shared catalog), which was critical for large clients

CRM (internal journey):

• Designed a request status model and handoffs between staff, replacing manual tracking in Excel.
• We made filling in supplier requests as easy as possible for buyers:
  • The request itself started showing products similar to those on the storefront
  • Buyers could export files ready for suppliers in bulk. We added automatic translation into Chinese on export
• We let staff comment on requests
• For the business, we surfaced performance metrics of each team

Result

• Speed: cut the request cycle (from creating a request to being able to buy) from 12 to 3 days.
• Conversion: raised search-⁠to-⁠order conversion to ~30%.
• Automation: fully digitized buyers' work, removing the risk of losing data when an order passed between departments.

The next step was launching a client dashboard for tracking statuses — but that’s a story for another case