The case study focuses on an Iranian largest classified ads app with a new mobile-based feature that allows store owners to sell their goods.

Problem:

The average number of posts in each store is low. In contrast to visiting the posts of each store, which is high, users are unaware of store profiles and do not know that they can view all posts of a store on its profile page.

Goal:

1. Each store should have published more posts on average.
2. Notify users of the existence of store profiles.
3. There should be a greater variety of products available to buyers.
4. An increase in seller activity, resulting in more revenue.

What should we do?

Our goal should be to find ways to encourage merchants to make more posts on their pages as users reach more products and increase seller activity: Making the app more competitive between sellers to increase their sales.

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The Design:

After many iterations we decided to promote stores that has more activity, so they have more income. There is a great opportunity to promote these stores in the post-list. Post-List is the main screen after user’s search and filtering that shows the stores posts sorting by the time of share.

We can show stores in Suggestion-Row component in SONNAT design system. Suggestion-Row Displayed at the image below:

Then post-list is like image below:

Where should the suggestion-row appear?

We decided to put it after the 12th row of posts for two reasons. First, it’s not really that important for it to appear at the top of the page. Second, it needs to be compatible with desktop mode.

For desktops, we have three columns in full-screen mode, and for lower widths, it’s two columns. Twelve can divided by 2 and 3.

Ranking logic

(Please note that the numbers are not real in this case study!)

Which store can be in the list?

• Stores that has at least 20 active posts are include.
• Stores with at least a post in searched category will be showed in the list.
• They will be sort descending by the number of their activity. Activity is (published post in searched category in last 10 days) + (laddered posts in searched category in 10 days)

Laddering: Stores can pay to shift their post to top of the post-list.

According to the above conditions, if the number of remaining stores is less than 5, the list of stores should not be displayed.

• If two or more store had a equal number of activity, we sort them by the time of their activity. The priority is given to stores that are closer to the present
• This list will refreshed every 24 hours.

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Challenges:

The impact of adding Suggestion-Row on the post list:

There is no doubt that adding this section to the main post-list will increase click-throughs. We should, however, check the side effects of this feature. The main application of this page is showing posts sorting by the time of share.

Addition of this Suggestion-Row can affect the average user’s scrolling rate on this page. About 70% of users scroll to the 72nd post on this page. After developing this feature we should check scrolling stats continuously.

Images on Suggestion-Row:

Store logos can be placed in the image part of suggestion-rows in normal status. Unfortunately, most of the stores in our platform do not have a logo. Stores without logos have placeholders in place of logos, but that’s not efficient when we show a list of stores. We created a new image using the stores logo and last post photo cover.

Metrics

We can measure the success of this feature by:

1. Number of published post per each store
2. Number of store profile views from this suggestion-row
3. Number of post laddering by stores

Also we should measure these items too:

1. Number of tapping on suggestion-row sections
2. Scrolling of post-list

Impact

Users became familiar with store profiles after this feature was introduced. Viewing store profiles has grown incredibly.

As I mentioned in first paragraph in challenges of this project, all of other metrics remains in good situation.