SOLshop
Introduced the cart and increased the amount of goods sold
About
SOLshop is a group-buying marketplace where prices are significantly lower than in retail stores — but products can only be purchased in groups of 2 to 100 people. The more people in the group, the better the price.
Join a group → Invite friends → Receive your product
Task
Introduce the cart so that users buy several goods at once.
Goals
Increase the amount and number of orders per user.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Year
2024
1. Before
Everything is quite simple here:
Selected a product
Placed an order using the “Buy as a Group” button
The order appears in the “Orders” section
Invite friends and wait for the group to fill4o
There’s also a “Buy Individual” option at a higher price, which acts as a reference point for retail pricing — primarily serving to encourage users to buy in a group.4o
“Look, you can buy bananas alone and we will even bring them to you.
Based on statistics, this function is used, but not more than 3% of buyers
2. Statistics
Before drawing new screens, let's collect stats
An average of 400 orders are placed per week, with 1 order equaling 1 item — that’s 400 units of product weekly.
Groups are successfully completed in 70% of cases.
3. Research
It might seem like a fairly straightforward task — just a regular shopping cart with a familiar flow:
Fill your cart → Pay → Invite others.
But in our case, one tricky question emerged:
“If a user buys a cart, should they share the entire cart or each item individually?”
On one hand, it makes sense — you’ve built your cart, so share the whole thing.
But realistically, how likely is it that someone else wants bananas, cooking oil, sardines, and chocolate in the exact same combination?
On the other hand, asking someone to join a separate group for each item is tedious and inconvenient.
What if I have 30 items in my cart?
To tackle this, we looked at best practices in group buying from around the world.
We studied how it’s handled by Pinduoduo (China), Bandit (Norway), and Facily (Brazil):
Summary:
Chinese platforms like Pinduoduo replace the cart with a “Favorites” system — if you pay for all of them, they split into separate group orders.
Norwegians skip the cart altogether.
Same with Finnish platforms — no cart.
We brainstormed internally and came to the conclusion that if a user tries to find like-minded buyers for their highly specific grocery cart, the chances of successfully forming groups would drop dramatically — almost to zero.
As a result, we decided that when a user places an order from their cart, all items would split into separate group orders. At least initially, the user would need to manually send out invitations for each product. We also chose to keep the “Favorites” feature as a separate, independent entity.
4. Design
After all the introductory actions, we moved to the design
Product card — now includes an “Add to Cart” button.
Cart — becomes a standalone section, accessible from the navbar.
Checkout — now handles multiple items as a new entity.
Order confirmation step — where payment hasn’t gone through yet and the user can still review everything.
Order list — visually unaffected by the cart. Each item in the cart becomes an individual order.
Organically introduced the “Add to the cart” button on the product card
Continued the section of the cart with all its conditions
Introduced the cart in checkout
We showcased how the cart appears during the order confirmation stage.4o
And I visualized how the cart behaves when it splits into individual orders.
This outcome was preceded by multiple calls, iterations, edits, and back-and-forths with R&D — all to ensure it wouldn’t cost us months or years of development.
In the end, we arrived at a detailed flow that covers all possible project states.
5. Results
The number of orders didn’t increase, but their volume did — on average, each of the 400 weekly orders now contains 3 items, which is a 3× growth in product throughput.
Due to the rise in total orders, group completion rates dropped slightly — from ~70% to ~60%. However, since we’re now forming 3× more groups, this dip is acceptable from a broader statistical standpoint.
