Brenda Taylor

Minneapolis Craft Market

The Minneapolis Craft Market (MCM) coordinates and provides a regular venue for independent makers in the Twin Cities area.

After in-person gatherings were shut down due to the pandemic, MCM needed to quickly bring their market online. They wanted to make sure that their makers could upload products, manage inventory and ship orders independently, while providing shoppers with a seamless one-stop-shop ordering process. Because MCM has over 1,000 makers in their Approved Trader list, it was essential that vendor commissions and payouts were calculated automatically, and that the process for vendor store set-up was simple and intuitive.

For this project, I collaborated with MCM's team to build the product taxonomy systems that the makers would use to categorize their products and that shoppers would use to navigate while shopping. I also created user flows, wireframes, and mockups using MCM's existing brand guidelines.

Because of time and budget restrictions, we determined that the best tool to use to build this multi-vendor marketplace would be a plug-in. Once all of the designs were approved, I researched to find the best plug-in to meet the client's needs, and ultimately recommended, installed, and configured the Webkul multi-vendor marketplace Shopify plug-in. Finally, I built a Shopify theme and made customized the plug-in to reflect the approved designs and project goals.

Before a full launch, we invited 25 makers to be beta testers. These testers set up their 'stores' and user profiles, uploaded products, and ran simulated transactions, then gave feedback based on their experience. MCM's team and I assessed the users' responses, then I fixed any bugs and made the agreed-upon changes to improve the site's user experience.

No items found.