Needi

Project Overview

Needi is the stress-free way to find and share the perfect gifting experience. Their intelligent gift-matching technology helps you find the perfect gift simply by asking you a few questions about the recipient and connecting you with local, independent merchants. The Needi vision is to eliminate waste from the gifting economy and support the livelihoods of independent business owners all over the world.

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Here is how the founders describe their journey to creating Needi:

“Our favourite things in life are spreading positivity, empowering people and building meaningful relationships. When we learned that 84% of people find gift-shopping stressful, 50% of Brits admit receiving gifts they dislike and 1 in 5 gifts go to landfill, we knew we had to change that! Our passion for supporting amazing local businesses and finding extraordinary gifts lead us to create needi. A thoughtful, stress-free gift-matching service that’s great for people and our planet.”

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The Needi team enlisted the help of Aztech to build their new gifting marketplace. Prior to engaging with Aztech, Needi had no way for customers to process orders and no tech stack to fulfill gift matching. They were running a static website and everything was being done manually by hand on the backend. We worked with Needi to design and build a fully fledged two-sided marketplace that allowed merchants to create their own user accounts and list products; and on the other side, allowed customers to search for gifts and make orders through the Needi marketplace.

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Key Challenges

As an early stage business, we had to think strategically about the type of eCommerce infrastructure that Needi required in order to meet existing demand, but also to scale up in the future. Adding multi-vendor capabilities to the marketplace was an additional challenge that had its own complexities and nuances.
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As part of the project brief, we also needed to create an eCommerce experience that was representative of Needi’s desire to establish itself as a premium gift matching service.
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We also worked with the Needi team to set up the logic and user journey mapping for the Needi gift matching algorithm.
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There were many aspects of the design and functionality that fell outside the built-in capabilities of Shopify, such as:

• _{The ability for users to add personalized gift messaging on purchases.}
• _{Customer wish lists and wishlist social sharing.}
• _{The ability for customers to add gift wrapping at checkout.}
• _{Allowing the customer to set a specific date for their gift purchase to be delivered.
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Ensuring a high quality customer experience at every step of the user journey, including post purchase support was another focus area of importance for Needi.

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Our Solution

A Multi Vendor Marketplace that allowed Needi to automate sales and scale their revenue.

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Prior to engaging with Aztech, Needi did not have a Direct To Consumer sales channel. They had a static website where they manually curated product recommendations for customers and then liaised with merchants on an individual basis to create product recommendations to send to giftees.

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The design solution for this project was twofold. We had to think about the experience for both customers who would be using the marketplace, as well as Merchants who would be signing up to create Merchant accounts and list their products.

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Incorporating design thinking principles allowed us to reverse engineer the perspective of the end user for both of these scenarios. Leveraging a third party application for the merchant backend on this project meant we were somewhat restricted with the design of the merchant experience.

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We leveraged custom frontend development along with application add ons to build solutions for the functional requirements outlined above.

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Aztech successfully helped Needi to launch their Multi Vendor Marketplace within 10 weeks of our initial engagement. This new marketplace build has also allowed Needi to secure over £300,000 in investment capital to further their growth and expansion for the rest of 2022.