Shipping, Fintech, E-com
This project saw me tackle the design end of three massive Business Units, while trying to achieve the ambitious goal of bringing in new partners to sell products on Mercado Libre.
The Incumbent State
Mercado Libre has a dozes of Business Units. But for this project, we'll focus on 3: In-store Payments, Shipping and E-commerce. Each worked independently and each defined the entity "location" differently. While this worked within the ecosystem, having different meanings and inner workings of the location entity presented challenges and roadblocks for growth for each unit.
An Ecosystem Problem
Our bussines goal was to bring in pharmacies to sell on the marketplace. This allowed to deliver medicine or other CPG products from each store location under an hour. But since the Location entity was different across the three units, we couldn't just go forward with the implementation. We needed to make "under the hood" changes. Because a new aligned entity meant the experience could live under one screen, rather than 3 different ones for each BU.
Framing the Problem
We focused a lot on defining the new entity of location. This opened a lot of fixes that we needed to review in order to even start talking about pharmacies. Along with the Dev and Product teams of each BU, we prioritized a set of mini tasks that where roadblocks to even start to solve the problem.
Conceptualization
Before designing any screens, we focused on the different legacy journeys and how could we create a solution that somehow solved the problem but didn't ruin the sellers with no pharmacies. This was the systemic approach.
Design Approach
As you can see on the IA diagrams above, the architecture was all over the place. This was a huge change and out of scope from the initial project. That's where the mini tasks come in handy: bump the existing flows, create a central hub.
An optimized flow
Even though we anticipated that the main issue was an IA problem, our team moved forward to create a Hub that connected all three BUs. It will take years to unify the three BUs under one single app, but this solution allow to meet the business goals and to keep the legacy users.
A temporary product to hold 3 use cases
While living with the incumbent IA, we created this Hub that helped users have a clear overview of stock, address, shipment and payments and store management. Although the Hub had limited features, it helped us connect three BU while keeping the legacy flows. This was the key value of this hub.
Easy toggle between services
The most important feature for achieving the business objective was to set up a store and enable services that allowed them to opt-in multiple stores and deliver shipping in under an hours. More stores, more coverage
Outcomes
Successfully onboarded 8 sellers in the pilot phase with zero major experience issues or complaints before broader rollout. Shipping and Fintech both reported growth in payment processing and delivery performance from opted-in locations. And we built a new team within the organization that understands all the locations entities.