What’s Material Depot for Business?

The following project was an experiment that began mid-April and evolved into a crucial business front in the Material Depot ecosystem of Apps. Learn more about Material Depot here.

'Material Depot for Business' is the vendor side of Material Depot website, where it helps them 1. Access a higher level of information of 2. What leads they're receiving, 3. Understanding their popular products, managing bid requests and lastly the purchase orders placed with them.

The app currently sits as a web-app integrated into our existing android app and opens a customized experience of Material Depot tailored for brands, material businesses and vendors.

How to find businesses?

Everything on Material Depot so far has been about architects (consumer side). How do we get the vendor experience right so that the loop is complete? The idea was to complete this circle where there is a supply side that uploads/fulfils products that can bring in new products every day and architects/homeowners who discover and use them.

How project came to existence

Material Depot app has multiple moving parts, and only users will not be enough to run it. The first phase of uploading products used many methods including mining other websites, screening PDF catalogs manually and asking brands to give their dumps directly. It will require much more active touch points to actually get materials and construction products on a real time basis.

*It is important to note that building material products come to life and expire almost every day. And there are 100's of catalog products that discontinue leading to time waste in pursuing them. These two objective brought vendor app to come to life.

Timeline

The first phase of the project started in May '22, where we were thinking of ways to get contacts actively for vendors. The design was intended to be kept as simple as possible while using some custom elements. Functionality was the key. The second phase of the product was to actively onboard them through the main Material Depot app experience.

My role and responsibilities

1. The pitch for the app and to make it stand separate from Material Depot. Aspirational enough for people to sign up at the same time doesn't confuse messages.

2. Create very simple and straightforward flows for low-tech users in supplier-based construction industry roles.

3. Fields should be very tailored according to the vendors we are looking for - Usability a/b testing. Make the most of the leads.

4. Matching marketing efforts to ensure we get sufficient leads to test this in two weeks.

5. Developing enough data for these to evolve into a successful bidding platform.

Target User Group / Attributes

The target users are vendors, suppliers, manufacturers and sales reps. This user group is not very tech-enabled and mostly like to operate in phone calls and WhatsApp messages. Something simple will always be appreciated.

Brainstorming and Research

The first part of exercise is tailored around lead generation first and then enabling action by those leads in the form of bids. A very well-known platform is India Mart known to manage leads and drive actions in a similar sense. The vendor app in a way is a direct competitor to them in the construction materials market.

There are several other bidding platforms like Tender Tiger, Bids, and Procore, that are very similar to the kind of approach we are taking except for the fact that the platforms are mostly B2B or B2C.

With Material Depot and Material Depot for Business, we are taking a two-pronged approach by bringing a new B2B2C mode of making construction deals happen.

Design principles

Understanding that our target user group only uses very basic form of tech, the principal is to keep our user journeys as short and uncomplicated as possible. In addition to that, we'll extensively use customer support to not only help them complete user journeys but take user feedback as well.

Phase 1: Finding vendors

The design included 3 elements:

1. The form + Branding + Campaigns: The form was crafted in a responsive manner with addressing Material UI framework.

2. The app: The app was bifurcated into two parts for accommodating this use case.

3. Three marketing campaigns with audiences. The first one was getting initial registrations.

The next step in this journey was to build an experience where vendors can meaningfully engage with architects requesting prices or fulfil bids. Here's how we bridged that gap online.