Selling cabbage in clicks not calls
Building a new experience for farmers to sell their surplus/imperfect produce on an online marketplace.
Full Harvest Background
One-third of all edible produce grown on farms is wasted due to surplus or cosmetic reasons. The energy required to grow this wasted produce contributes to 8% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US (equal to emissions from 33 million cars).
Produce is bought and sold over the phone and email. Only 4% of produce is sold online today. Full Harvest wants to rethink the produce industry by bringing B2B transactions online to increase efficiency and help sell food that wouldn’t sell otherwise.
We created an online B2B marketplace to connect farms with food processors and brands that don’t need perfect produce.
The Challenge
Today, farms sell their produce directly to buyers or through brokers. Almost all of these transactions are completed without modern technology. The sales process is founded on relationships and trust.
Before this project, Full Harvest was acting like a traditional produce broker by managing all produce sales via phone and email. This time-consuming process prevented our Suppliers (farms) from regularly posting and updating produce on the Full Harvest platform.
In order to grow the supply on our marketplace, we need to let Suppliers contribute directly to the marketplace by posting and managing products by themselves. Disrupting the phone/email-based sales process is a huge challenge, but we believe that it is the only way to enable the sale of ugly and surplus produce at scale.
The Job to be Done
Increase the amount of produce on the marketplace by:
Onboarding Suppliers more efficiently.
Enabling Suppliers to post and manage produce themselves in a timely, accurate way.
Supplier Interviews
I started the design process with a series of four 45 minute interviews with key Supplier accounts. I wrote up an extensive report on my findings and presented it to the entire company.
The goal of these interviews was to understand how our suppliers manage their products from the field to distribution.
I interviewed four farms selling sweet potatoes, bell peppers, cauliflower & watermelon through Full Harvest.
“One challenging aspect is building trust, this business is relationship-based. We try to go above and beyond with our customer service.”
Learning 1:
Speed is of the essence
Suppliers view Full Harvest as their last ditch effort to offload surplus/imperfect produce that is past its prime. Because it is perishable, they want to sell it as quickly as possible.
So What? Our value-add is the ability to instantly connect suppliers with a network of buyers. Products should be approved and posted as quickly as possible.
Learning 2:
First impressions matter
Suppliers will do anything if it will generate a sale, but if they don’t get a sale, they are unlikely to keep posting – this happened with other online produce platforms.
So what? We need to define what is an acceptable sell-through rate for suppliers. We should reinforce to suppliers that even if their first few posts don’t work out, they should keep trying because they will eventually get a sale.
Learning 3:
This business is relationship-based
Suppliers work hard to build trust with their customers by delivering quality produce consistently and on time. They do not view calls and emails as a pain point because it is seen as an essential part of doing business.
So what? Our platform should feel personalized and have a high level of human touch. The idea of a 100% automated sales process is not appealing. Good customer service, on time deliveries & communication instills confidence.
Building a holistic experience for our suppliers
No feature lives in a vacuum. If we wanted Suppliers to post their produce, we needed to make sure that their entire experience with Full Harvest was pleasant and intuitive from the moment they signed up on the platform to the moment they got their first sale.
I started defining the problem by digging into the first interaction suppliers had with Full Harvest. The signup flow was not gathering the right data and it left the user at a dead end where they often sat waiting for us to contact them over email.
Onboarding suppliers usually took 3-4 weeks to complete and by the time all the documents were in order, we might have lost an opportunity to help the supplier sell produce. We needed to move more quickly if we wanted to help offload perishable goods.
Pain points in the supplier onboarding experience
Except for an outdated signup flow, our entire onboarding process previously took place offline. I spent a lot of time with our supplier relations team understanding their pain points in onboarding suppliers. Onboarding often took 3+ weeks to complete prior to this project.
Throughout the design process, I continually updated a user journey map. Email notifications are the main form of communication with Suppliers, so making sure that each action in the platform (or lack thereof) triggered an email was critical.
Over the course of about three quarters, I redesigned almost every touchpoint in the Supplier journey to create a cohesive journey through onboarding, posting a product, and managing product posts.
User journey to post a product
I mapped the happy path for a supplier posting a product on our marketplace. Knowing that re-engagement was key to success, I also mapped out triggers for email notifications to the supplier in the green stripe on the bottom of the diagram.
I designed a comprehensive New Supplier Experience from landing page to sale
The project was broken down into 4 steps that worked together to onboard new Suppliers:
A prospective Supplier comes to our marketing website & goes to the “Farms” Page
The Supplier goes through the signup flow
The Supplier lands on an informational homepage in the platform
The Supplier creates their first post on the marketplace
Step 1. A prospective Supplier comes to our marketing website & goes to the “Farms” Page
We wanted this experience to start before the Supplier even got into the platform. The marketing site was outdated and needed to reflect the great new features we offer Suppliers. I designed the page in Figma and built it myself in Hubspot, our CMS.
The new marketing page not only looks better but also gives our audience a much better understanding of what we have to offer and emphasizes our technology.
Step 2. The supplier goes through the signup flow
Our old onboarding experience for Suppliers included a survey with lots of unnecessary questions and led them to a dead-end thank you page — the only way to go was up!
I designed a faster, more value-driven onboarding UX.
The UI of the old onboarding survey was overcrowded and distracted the user with an alert about password creation that was not relevant at that moment.
Buyer signup User Journey
The new onboarding survey UX only gathers the essential information from Suppliers and if they do not meet our requirement of growing in the US, then we do not allow them to finish creating an account. This simple alternative path saved our Supply Team many hours reviewing sign ups for Suppliers that would not be approved.
Step 3. The Supplier lands on an informational homepage in the platform
We decided to educate our new users about how to navigate the platform through an informational landing page. We primarily wanted to drive them from signup to posting a product, but we also wanted to welcome them and answer other questions they may have at that stage.
The commodities that Suppliers selected in the signup flow are surfaced on this homepage to give it a personalized feel. Now the Supplier can simply click POST CABBAGE and get started.
I went through a ridiculous number of iterations for the Supplier homepage, here are some of them…
Proposed design variations for the Supplier homepage
Step 4. The Supplier creates their first post on the marketplace
The Supply Posting Experience is a 9 step posting flow that allows the supplier to describe the produce they want to sell to the level of detail that we know our Buyers want. By asking for a lot of information upfront, we reduce the need for back-and-forth communication and negotiations, thus reducing the time the time it takes to sell.
We are defining new standards for produce that do not exist elsewhere. Every field in this UX required communication with our internal Supplier relations team.
Posting a product on Full Harvest
We demoed the new posting flow, the feedback was positive
I worked closely with our Supply Team to educate Suppliers about the new experience. We sent out a feature announcement email with a CTA to set up a demo.
Our diligent Supply Team conducted live demos with 72 Suppliers (both onboarded and not yet onboarded). I sat in on ten of these demo calls to hear what our users thought about the new feature and recorded and organized all the Supplier feedback. I digested many pages of notes into actionable opportunities for iterating on the feature.
We did not nail the Supplier posting experience with our MVP, but by demoing the feature and getting feedback, we were able to quickly catch many of the biggest issues for Suppliers.
Onboarding went from weeks to minutes & we increased supply 40x
We are thrilled by the results of the new onboarding process. These improvements massively increased the velocity that our Supply Team can onboard new suppliers. By being able to signup and sell faster, we have happier Suppliers.
In the first month, we saw 1000+ produce posts across 150+ onboarded farms! The feature achieved its goal of increasing the amount of produce on the marketplace and was very well-received by our Suppliers.
