User Research for a SaaS: Part 1

In this post, I document my ramblings rationale behind my content strategy for one of my clients.

If you want, skip on to part 2, aka the actual work.

Background

My client’s main product is a repricer. It’s a SaaS that updates prices for products sold on marketplaces in real time. Here are some examples of how it’s used:

• maintaining a certain price on the product that allows the users to maximize the profit margin without significant losses in sales,
• automatically underbidding lower-priced competitors,
• making automatic decisions on whether or not to participate in marketplace promotions (big issue for sellers, as marketplaces often force sellers to respond to a promotion invite during the night),
• using complex pricing algorithms. For example, one allowed the user to increase the price when the item was almost out of stock and lower it back when the system expects a new delivery.

User segmentation

When I joined the project, the main part of the solution had already been developed and was undergoing a closed beta test. In situations like these, I don’t try to create an ideal product or to disrupt the existing processes too much. My task is to focus on those 20% that will improve the product by 80%.

All of my projects begin with identifying users and splitting them into groups.

After conducting some interviews and research, I concluded that, in most cases, we have two types of users:

• Marketplace manager
• Their supervisor (director)

A marketplace manager is a person who monitors the entire back office (logistics and stock) and who is responsible for product listings and their prices on the marketplaces. They are expected to deliver a maximum number of sales with the largest profit margin. In short, their job is to make as much money as possible. Their pains are:

• Large volume of data at once. Product costs are made up of many indicators, and the price must stay competitive.
• Significant cost of error. If a mistake is made and the dimensions are set incorrectly, the company loses a lot of money on delivery. For instance, in one case, a user sold boilers 50 centimeters wide but calculated the delivery fees for them as if they measured 5 meters.

The job of a marketplace manager can be performed by a sales person, or even by the director himself, if the company is small. The process stays the same.

Nevertheless, directors use a very limited part of our functionality, so I will not focus on them, except for marketing (more on that below).

What other user groups have I identified? There are several types of users that are not interesting to us, which I’ve collectively labeled as “enthusiasts”. These are, essentially, people for whom fine optimization is not so important:

• Manufacturer. They sell what they produce. For them, increasing their margin by X cents is not as important as developing their brand and increasing their sales revenue.
• Newbie. A manager who has few sales for one reason or another. They either offer a small amount of goods or no one buys them.

Conclusions about users

The repricer is not intended to solve the sales issue, at least directly. Its task is to rather modify prices in real time, in order to get the maximum number of sales and squeeze competitors out of the field. It acts somewhat like a trading bot. Its main clients are experienced resellers. 

As a consequence, this is what I decided.

• I will not be explaining the principles of sales or marketplaces.
• I will focus on the main tasks of users, such as maintaining the profit margin, managing promotions and competitors. Everything else, such as, for instance, the number of images in the product card, will be removed from the interface and mentioned only briefly.
• I will simplify the terminology as much as possible, if clients already know what I am talking about, but not at the expense of clarity. If the repricer displays the term “ForePay amount”, I will not be changing that to “the amount that the marketplace transfers to you after all discounts, minus the commission”.

UX research

This is my favorite part. I enjoy finding out what users really need and serving them. Sometimes it is not what we are offering them, and very often it’s not what we are focusing on in our communication.

I already mentioned that I have divided the users into end users and key users. The end user is the one who will click on the buttons, however, in most cases, they won’t be the person who makes the purchase decision. The key user is the opposite.

The repricer’s features are applied differently for our two user categories.

• Automation of manual steps: convenienсe and time-efficiency for the end user. For the key user, this is saving human resources. There is a natural competition in the head of the director between hiring another manager and buying a repricer. I will write more on this below.
• Checking for human errors: the end user sleeps well at night and is less stressed, the key user is saving money.
• Fine-tuning: the end user becomes a more valuable employee if he does this correctly. He becomes sort of a price magician in the eyes of management. As a result, the key user is earning more.

Based on this, we put together user stories targeted at marketplace managers and formulate an approach to marketing communication targeted at their supervisors.

As the product is complex, we set ourselves the following priorities:

1. Clear interface 
2. Tutorial videos
3. Contextual help 

What was that about competition between a repricer and extra managers?

In our case, the decision maker is not the marketplace manager himself, but rather the director, or the commercial director. They hire and control them, and they are the one who we need to sell the product to. For them, the competitive advantage looks like this:

• Automate the majority of analytics and manual actions —> free up managers’ time —> reduce staff costs
• Reduce chance of human error —> reduce overhead

Without a repricer, these problems are solved by hiring more or better qualified managers. Now, to convince the director that a repricer is cheaper than a new manager, is the task for marketing. I met with them and explained this to them.

Conclusions

The marketers focused on cost reduction and savings in all marketing communication. This can be demonstrated with cases, for example when a user increased their market share from 20% to 80% on a certain item through automatic underbidding.

For my target audience, the end users, the message will be different: “Here is all your data, here is how we calculated it, here is the profit from these steps, go pour yourself some coffee and relax while we monitor sales.” Based on this, I will develop and implement a content strategy with a focus on the interface, videos and contextual help.