About

red_mad_robot in partnership with the bank and shopping platform Eyebuy launched an innovative marketplace in Kazakhstan based on the live commerce model. Marketplace for buyers, sellers, and bloggers with a built-in banking service.

The idea to combine virtual shopping and live broadcasts of the manufacturer, seller, and blogger was exactly the basis of the project — at the end of 2021, a service for online shopping appeared on the market, the model of which is built on viewing video content from influencers and the ability to quickly order the product you like.

Business goal

The client's ecosystem development strategy aimed to differentiate from standard market players by becoming more than just another shopping platform with installment options. Instead, they envisioned creating a trusted shopping assistant and navigator - a unified platform where both consumers and businesses could accomplish their goals.

In just a few months, we needed to develop and launch a startup product for a bank client:

• Conduct market research
• Build a concept and launch an MVP
• Establish cross-functional teams and transfer capabilities to the client's side with ongoing support

Product work

I have joined the team from the very beginning and led:

• market research and ideation
• stakeholder management and requirements gathering
• design and development cycles across 5 teams (25+ people)
• critical system integrations including integrations with BNPL payment provider and other third-party vendors.

Market research

While strategizing, we worked not just on the app, but on the concept of an entire ecosystem that could be built on top of it.

After conducting 34 in-depth interviews with representatives of 4 target audience groups we found the actual pains and needs on which to build the new product idea and value proposition. It turned out that Kazakhstan residents rely on the opinions of Influencers and bloggers while choosing goods:

• Buyers want to easily find what they need
• Streamers and bloggers want to make content and earn money
• Producers want to increase business efficiency
• Sellers want to sell and earn more.

The live commerce model answers all of these needs at the same time.

Design and development

In joint processes, our task was to become a guarantor of the correct operation of all components of the product, including boxed systems, banking, and external services with which we had to integrate.

The project was shared between five technical teams worked in parallel. My team was responsible for:

• Customisation of out-of-the-box marketplace - production ready solution that needed to be adapted to client requirements, integrated with a streaming platform, configured with a new installment payment method, billing, logistics, and much more.
• Personalize stream feeds - aggregates both streaming and products. Formed on the backend to suit the client's tastes and interests, depending on what tags he chooses when entering the application.
• Payment in equal installments (BNPL - buy now, pay later) - ability to ****buy products in installments. To do this, the buyer must pass certain limits: there are no debts, there is a sufficient amount on the account for all installments and it does not exceed the maximum limits. After processing, the buyer goes through the scoring stages on the bank's side and receives a spreadsheet with a payment schedule in four equal installments for a certain number of months.

Outcome

In December 2021, we began to gradually transfer the product to the client and withdrew our team from the project.

The period from December to January was particularly indicative. First month in production brought our partner:

• 400+ completed orders
• 17 thousand unique users had registered in the app, and the total library of 559 videos