ShopLocalRhodeIsland Lessons Learned Chapter 2: Be Open to Feedback

In last week's blog, we introduced the first “chapter” of our review and lessons learned on the launch of the ShopLocalRhodeIsland.com marketplace. Last week we discussed the importance of patience and how much of a difference it can make while working on any project. This week we are going to dive deeper into constructive criticism and how not to take it personally. 

Chapter 2: Being Open to Feedback

The second key takeaway from the ShopLocal journey is being open to constructive criticism and owning it! Through this process, we have learned that feedback was the key to our success and we expect that it will continue to be so. Hearing what others have to say and seeing how their suggestions about improvements create a better outcome wasn’t always easy. But, through this process, we’ve learned not to take it all personally and rather, use it instead to learn, grow, and move forward. 

Without our Beta Testers’ feedback, the marketplace wouldn’t have the functionality that it does today. Being open to criticism sparks and brings new ideas to the table that you might’ve never thought of on your own. In our case, the Shipping and Payment instructions weren't so clear to our Beta Testers and there was a lot of confusion. After walking through the processes with our developers, our shipping aggregator, and many different businesses we discovered the ways in which we could make the process and instructions clearer and more user-friendly. In this case, all of people involved had things to repair or fix, and without that direct feedback we could have had some real problems on our hands!  

One of our Beta Testers, Oatsy Anya, a bath and beauty company, wasn’t shy about giving us feedback and we can’t thank them enough for it! Oatsy Anya struggled with our shipping methods more than any other company and nobody could figure out why. At first, they gave us feedback on how to make the instructions clearer for our vendors. We did that. We went through our Vendor Onboarding guide, step by step, and made the directions less confusing. We took out extra steps that weren’t necessary so it would become more straightforward. Through this process we realized that Oasty Anya hadn’t configured their shipping account correctly. Their products weren’t shippable, and therefore couldn’t get through ShopLocal’s check-out process.

After working together with daily feedback, we are were able to find a solutions for a number of problems; but everyone had to join the process!

But that wasn’t the end of Oatsy Anya's shipping issues! 

Oatsy Anya was also the only vendor who chose to use UPS as their shipping method. Once we were able to solve their configuration issues and successfully process their products into our cart, and through delivery; we realized that the UPS shipping rate for a $10 product was over $30!

Long story short, we want our vendors to have the best, least expensive shipping rates as possible. Since we are still unable to target the heart of that problem, ShopLocal has decided recommend that all our vendors use the United State Postal Service because of their affordable shipping rates.

Ongoing feedback is critical for success - in any capacity - but while rolling out ShopLocal, it became super critical and will will continue! If we didn’t have a vendor to work through this with, we would be operating in the dark without solutions.

Oatsy Anya, we thank you for giving us your feedback. It truly made a difference in the marketplace! 

Stay tuned next week for Chapter 3… A marketing organization (Visual Thrive) becomes a technology company. It’s not always pretty!!!