In cities like Port Harcourt and Lagos, grocery shopping is often an offline, fragmented experience. People face: Long queues and stressful commutes to local markets, Unpredictable pricing and product availability, Lack of trusted digital solutions for everyday grocery needs, The challenge was to build a platform that felt local, familiar, and incredibly easy to use—even for people with minimal tech exposure.

I interviewed potential users from different demographics we identified as the core users of stayples. These includes categories of individuals like Gen-z; younger Nigerians are open to more ecommerce solutions compared with older families , People with Health Challenges; disabled people find it difficult to make grocery runs and even people with temporary ailments will need someone to shop for them for that period, Busy Professionals; career focused families and individuals that do not have the time for market runs. I also had interviews with users of our competitors: Pricepally and Golemon users that offer a similar service

The key finding from this research created a northstar for the stayples product experience. SES - Save Time, Eat Fresh and Spend Less. The product should reduce the time users spend from purchase to delivery, users want to receive the highest quality fresh groceries and get them at the cheapest possible prices (something I found was very unique to the Nigerian market - above a certain price, users would not want to pay much higher to receive better quality).

I needed to validate some of the ideas we found in our research for this product. I coordinated the design of the version 1 of the stayples website. We used a Google form to get market lists from users, generate and invoice and then fulfill those market requests after payment was made. After validating this step, we embedded the form in the website which made it easy for users to type their lists directly into the website and select options for delivery. With the Google form redirect removed more users gained confidence in using the platform. I used the information I got from early users to design how the mobile app will work.

The stayples app prioritizes usability with large buttons, simple 3 button navigation and fast check out. One major feedback we got from early users after launching the app was that it was that it is extremely easy to use. My approach with this was stripping the ecommerce platform to only have essential features for the market flow before introducing other product segments like discounts, special items,etc. All products are placed into categories with a search functionality to find any item

A common process thats a key part of the Nigerian market experience, is cutting, blending, grinding or processing your food items in the market before bringing them home. This saves the time of preparing food for a lot of households as market vendors can process these items at little cost either by blending your tomatoes, cutting the leaves of all the vegetables purchased or grinding your crayfish. This essential part of the market process was captured in the variants part of our product page. These variants can also represent different weights of an item e.g 25kg or 50kg Bag of rice. This was a standardised way of representing the dynamic pricing for the different forms of a single market item depending on how the user wants it.

After adding items to cart. I introduced a swipe to delete gesture for removing items from the cart after selecting all the products required. You can also increase the quantity of an item directly from the product page. Clicking any item on the cart allows you to update the product variant selected from the product page.

From competitior analysis and earlier user research, speed was a key factor most users prioritized when grocery shopping. I also noticed that most of stayples competitors did not offer same delivery as an option, this option was introduced at checkout, with other options to schedule your delivery up to 2 days in advance, this helped shoppers plan and organize all the items they will need at home before hand and get it delivered to them. A promo code field was also introduced at this point for discounts and brand promos.

After placing an order, an order status shows on your mobile app home page with the delivery date selected. Clicking this tab reveals all the items ordered and the amount paid for these items, At the current stage of the product we do not have a way to receive automatic updates from the logistics partners, this means we only have 2 status updates, mainly pending and then delivered. I plan to introduce out an "out for delivery status" in the future along with in app notifications to improve this process.

The idea for stayples came directly from people writing market lists, as this is the MVP for the app, I prioritized only core features to test usability. A way introduced this concept at the MVP stage was to allow modification of a previously made order and readding it to cart. This means users can add an order in their order history to cart, add or remove items from that list and place the order again. Most users recurring orders are very similar, so it is a better approach to allow users repurchase items from their order history allwoing them to make modifications. On an average a single users orders from our platform twice a month and usually just restock on items that have finished.

The idea I have for stayples is to introduce gamification and leaderboards allowing users to collectively share the shopping experience with family and friends. We will also explore bulk ordering of groceries for users to reduce prices for users within a family pod as lower prices is one of the core problems this app hopes to solve. With this more dynamic discounts and user in app engagements systems will be created, price notifications showing when prices of food products are in and out of season and have a corresponding price crash.

On the other end, I also designed the admin system for updating prices of products, adding discounts. To make the admin system more robust, a platform for logistics partners will be created which will allow us to track deliveries and time to complete an order which is a key metric (speed) to improve on as the business scales.