Partnership management solution for influencers & e-commerce businesses raising $12M
Fermat Commerce
Fermat Commerce is a VC-backed startup helping brands supercharge their customer acquisition using distributed commerce. The company’s mission is to allow brands to offer their consumers frictionless shopping experiences that are native to content and context.
About the project
One of the channels of distribution Fermat was looking to help brands with was UGC and influencer content. As a brand, UGC and influencer content resonates very strongly with your consumers, but it is next to impossible to incorporate the content effectively into the buying journey.
When Fermat approached us, they had a vision of how to fix this complex problem.
The brand receives order as if it were on its own website while retaining rich analytics specific to each experience. The second scenario offers a more compelling experience – which translates to more effective customer acquisition. And this is what we’ve been working on together with Fermat.
When a consumer interacts with influencer content or UGC, she:
- clicks the link (in the post) and goes to a rich shopping experience native to the content
- Learns about the product and browses a related curation.
- Checks out to complete the transaction, direct to the brand
Our tasks
Building a dashboard for e-commerce brands
The dashboard would show the users how their business was going. It needed to be clear and easy to navigate.
Providing excellent user experience
App users should have felt playful vibes aligned with the latest e-commerce trends.
Taking care of the product quality
The expectations of the users were high. The software needed to be flawless.
Challenges
1. Building the product from scratch
Turning vision into reality is the core aspect of product development and, perhaps, the toughest one.
When the Fermat team approached us, they had a clear vision of what kind of product they wanted to build – and they needed a reliable team that would help them turn this vision into reality.
It requires:
- conducting comprehensive industry research,
- defining business goals and ways to achieve them,
- adjusting UX to the built target personas,
- and much of coding itself.
2. Achieving top administration panel user experience
The product’s target group is demanding, and the competition is vast. Therefore, the goal was to provide a unique user experience that would help the app stand out from the crowd.
3. Building a flawless, high-quality product
Though reaching high quality is always a challenge and pursuit for product companies, Fermat favored making the initial version as good as possible. They saw it as their Unique Value Proposition. As a result, they put a huge value on Minimal Viable Product that does not contain any errors, lags, or gaps.
Solutions
1. Forming an interdisciplinary team
Building a product from scratch requires much cross-field knowledge. Therefore, except for developers, the project involved:
- a scrum master who coached the delivery team & watched over the process,
- a product designer helping to generate product requirements, providing high-quality UI design and artifacts for testing,
- a QA engineer responsible for testing the app and caring for quality.
Combining these skills simplified the development process and made it possible to build the top product from scratch in less than one year.
2. Developing high-end dashboards for partnership management
The goal of developing excellent UX was to make the app both easy to use and engaging. Users should see immediately how their business is going. Therefore, we wanted to highlight crucial metrics such as Gross Merchandise Volume or the number of impressions. So, we made them visible in the dashboards at first glance.
Moreover, the design needed to be clear & consistent. That is why we adjusted it to the new typography & visual hierarchy and unified the components’ look.
The last goal was to make the app attractive. The users should distinguish the app from the others easily and should feel engaged using it. Therefore, we created a UI refractor and style guide corresponding to the client’s vivid & vibrant brand.
3. Running manual tests of the app
To ensure that the app runs without lags or gaps, the QA engineer joined the development team at the second stage of development. With functional and regression testing, we caught and fixed several bugs. Thanks to that, we ensured that the MVP reached high standards of product quality.
Project Results
Delivering a bug-less MVP
Combining the strengths of our front-end developers, designers, delivery team, and QA engineers with back-end developers from the client’s side turned out to be a great idea. We built an MVP of high performance that was not burdened with any bugs.
Creating outstanding UX
Thanks to close cooperation with the client’s team – workshops and regular meetings, we defined what perfect UX should look like. Then, with the know-how of our product designers, we created simple, consistent, and attractive UX & UI.
Helping Fermat get to their next milestone
The product we developed together allowed Fermat to rapidly iterate, understand the market, and deliver value to their customers, ultimately resulting in Fermat announcing their 12M seed round in August.
