Objective: to provide a design concept for a universal marketplace for everything.
For e-commerce users, shopping has become a pleasure, and product doomscrolling has become a habit. Buyers are increasingly relying on the opinions of other people: ordinary users, Influencers, friends. We have suggested what a marketplace-for-all could look like in the not-too-distant future, if the above trends continue.
The key elements of marketplaces, in our opinion, would be socialization, a controlled recommendation system, and content integration.
Socializing
According to statistics, about half of all buyers are guided by other people's reviews. People trust friends and opinion leaders.
Built-in architecture-level socialization module allows you to see the actions of friends and other users: favorite products and made purchases (of course, those that the user chose to share).
Products positively evaluated by friends are marked accordingly and ranked higher.
Managed recommendation system
The automated recommendation system will be relegated to the secondary level. At least until the platform has more information about users.
Instead of an automatic one, a user-driven recommendation system is planned. Marketplace will allow for likes and dislikes of products, categories and users in order to form a map of interests on the site. The system will give the user the right to directly report what he likes.
The algorithms, of course, will also take into account the habits of doomscrolling and putting items in the cart or favorites.
Content integration
To preserve and strengthen the connection with customers, a modern marketplace should adopt elements of social networks and become a source of exchange of entertainment information associated with shopping.
To do this, the system incorporates a module for publishing user-generated content (video reactions, unboxing), as well as the possibility of advertising integrations for Influencers.
Content will eventually become one of the key factors that increase engagement and activity.
The innovations are aimed at maximizing the time users spend in the app, as to build long-term attachment.
The product cards are diluted with content boxes: announcements of future streams, as well as user reviews, unboxings, and reactions.
The content system, which includes stories and video streams, has internal product integration.
Thus, content creators will be able to demonstrate and even sell in real time the products mentioned in their stream.
The Marketplace should become not just a place to shop, but a lifestyle app.
