What modern online sales needs.
Areas of interest
People are often so busy with their everyday chores that they forget about their interests and likes. During one of my classes focused on values, experiences and ideas, I was asked about my experiences and ideas about things happening in this world. This was an eye-opening experience for me as these very simple questions were really hard for me to answer. However, after a considerable amount of thinking, I was able to answer some of these questions and this is where i present them.
People becoming more tech savvy is a change I am very excited about. This is so because I come from a background of people being very conservative against technology. However, this last decade has seen an incredible amount in growth of technology. According to IBM, reported on mediapost, 90% of data that exists today was created in the last two years which shows how much people have embraced technology. While I don’t have any particular ideas to get more people into embracing technology, I have seen and heard about several websites and programs run by very passionate people that help people get more familiar with technology. One of the more interesting programs I heard about was a group of people teaching old people how to use the internet to connect with their families.
Simple math tricks with +, -, * are some things I wish I could teach my friends. Growing up, I was really good with numbers which meant I understood numbers really well. Not only that, I became really good at doing basic addition and multiplication. Some examples are when multiplying 22 * 9, I would very quickly multiply 10 * 2 * 9 and then add 2 * 9 to it.
This makes sense as 22 * 9 = (20 + 2) * 9. Which in turn goes back to the initial idea. Technology already exists to share this knowledge and I am sure there are other people out there who understand this just as well which is why I have never bothered expanding on this other than bothering some of my friends every now and then.
People trying to scam others is a problem I am really concerned about. This wasn’t something I was even aware about until I tried to sell something online and had over 5 people try to scam me off my money. One of the most common scams is people sending fake PayPal emails about money they never sent and then try to convince people to send the goods to them. Popular websites like eBay and PayPal provide very limited amount of protection that has been taken advantage of by scammers for a while now.
So what now?
Well, the only reason this exists is because there are no services that can provide security over such online transactions. So a service that can receive items and money from the seller and buyer and guarantee security could very likely stop these scams at their roots.
But is there anything like that out there? (PEST analysis)
Sadly, the fraud laws are very vague in USA. The laws include terms like “scheme or artifice” without any clear definitions according to Justia.com. Not just that, the U.S. government reported that fraud is a significantly under-reported crime. I have been personally gotten almost scammed and not reported people to the cops because I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
Creating a service that can provide such security however requires a large amount of capital and infrastructural resource. However, because of this being a global problem, this product would be infinitely scalable making it a very profitable venture.A product like this has a very high chance to become the primary method of online transaction and promote trust between these buyers and sellers. As of technology, a simple MVP can be easily developed by a small group of web developers.
Competitive Landscape:
With the absence of any established service that handles both money and item for the two parties trying to do an online sale, this might be the perfect opportunity to launch this idea into reality. People have been relying on money transferring services(like PayPal, Venmo) and shipping service (like FedEx, USPS, UPS) separately which is what leads to confusion and is the root problem of all these scams. They however don’t serve in the same paradigm as online marketplaces only provide a platform whereas what users really need is a medium.
But who would want to change?
To test out this theory better, I decided to go out and interview some people who weren’t told what they were getting interviewed about. I introduced myself and talked about their everyday problems before even mentioning online sales.
User Interview:
8 out of the 13 people I tried to talk to didn’t want to talk at all, so the following responses were all recorded from 5 people.
2 out of these 5 people were very happy with their previous experiences with selling and/ or buying goods and services online which was unexpected. These people were happy with how things were and never had a second thought about the character and intentions of the people they were trying to make a sale to or buy things off. This however does not mean that these people are not going to need a medium to help facilitate their online sales as there is always going to be a chance that someone could scam them. Not only are these people trusting strangers on the internet but also, they are not aware of the existing problem. This means they are the ones who are more susceptible to getting scammed as they are not even aware of scammers.
Meanwhile, others who were aware of scammers shared their concern. They talked about how they had these rules about who they would buy off or sell to. Some of the more common rules were only to participate in sales with people who had previous successful sales or purchases on the website. These people also mentioned that they would get incredibly skeptical of people who weren’t very firm on the price and called it a red flag.
I then asked them about what services they use to send goods and pay for these goods or any other services and people mostly responded with the name of a common shipping service and PayPal respectively. Two people however expressed concerns with PayPal about how there’s always someone trying to scam them off their goods with fake PayPal emails. These people were normally also scared about buyers pulling back the funds after they received the goods.
This is when I asked if they wished for any kinds of services that would help make this process easier and everyone had very similar responses. They all wanted a service that would make sure they weren’t getting scammed and/ or a service that could secure their goods or money during the whole sale.
This seemed a lot like the service I initially described so I told these people about a service that would facilitate with online sales by taking the product from the seller and the money from the buyer and then verifying them based on the terms agreed upon by the two parties and then forward them to the parties. All the interviewees responded very positively to this idea and said that they would definitely use a service like that on their sales.
PRODUCT IDEA:
I helped online buyers and sellers achieve online buying and selling without the Fear of getting scammed by providing a middle man service who helps secure buyers’ money and sellers’ goods.
User Journey:
Let’s talk about some people who might be interested in using a product like this.
Molly the misses has had a bad marriage and has been waiting to buy something for her husband. Molly looks online for rings and finds this one ring under her budget sold by someone by the username “iTakeYourMoney”. Molly really likes this ring and believes that this ring is the key to saving her marriage but at the same time is very suspicious of the seller. Molly goes to the internet to find a service that could facilitate her buying this ring from this seller and make sure she gets this ring and saves her marriage without getting scammed. Luckily, our service exists and Molly is able to get that ring without any tension and saves her marriage.
Peter the programmer wants to buy a very expensive Graphics Card but he is a data science student who can’t afford to pay for expensive computer parts so he choses to get a used one. Peter posts on reddit about how he is looking for a GPU and multiple people contacted him with their offers. Peter was however torn between the price disparity because some of these people were selling the same product for a ridiculously low price. Peter was however skeptical because he was not sure if people selling for lower price were looking to scam him or not. He wished there was a service that could process the whole transaction and make sure he wouldn’t lose his money. Peter looks online and finds out our service and ends up saving a ton of money and still getting that good GPU he wanted.
WIREFRAMES:
Now there might be some of you who have never heard of wireframes before like me and to you I say, wireframes are just a bunch of ideas about what your app or any other product might look like. Here are a bunch of mockups for what my idea of this app could look like.
P.S. I asked for permission to use the conversation on this blog post and promised not to reveal names/identities.
