Merchant Portal is a centralized platform for businesses partnering with 7NOW Marketplace. It gives merchants greater visibility and control over their storefront, products, promotions, financial performance, and operational data.
The platform needed to support a wide range of businesses, including:
Merchants needed more flexibility and control over their 7NOW Marketplace operations. Since 7NOW Marketplace was newly launched, a centralized platform for merchants to manage all aspects of the store was needed. Merchant Portal was designed to be a scalable platform that could help merchants:
To understand merchant workflows and identify opportunities for the 7NOW Merchant Portal, I conducted competitive research across leading delivery platforms and interviewed two internal stakeholders at Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC): a senior financial analyst and a technology and integration specialist.
I also facilitated a workshop with the Marketplace team to align stakeholders on key pain points and opportunities.
The research highlighted an opportunity to go beyond basic merchant management. Users needed a more reliable way to access business data, resolve operational issues independently, and identify opportunities for growth. These insights shaped the portal's focus on streamlined workflows, actionable reporting, and self-service tools.
Following the stakeholder workshop, I translated prioritized merchant needs into a structured navigation hierarchy for the Merchant Portal. I organized key workflows across the left and top navigation, grouping related features to create a clear, scalable structure for managing day-to-day operations.
The sitemap established the foundation of Merchant Portal, organizing core business workflows alongside supporting tools and account settings. This provided a framework for navigation and future feature expansion.
One of the biggest considerations was the range of merchants using the platform. A small business managing a few locations may need a straightforward overview of sales and inventory, while an enterprise merchant may need to compare performance across hundreds of locations. To accommodate larger businesses, there was a need to support a "Business Group", which includes multiple businesses.
Merchants may manage hundreds of products, multiple locations, promotions, and large amounts of financial data, so the interface needed to support complex workflows such as analyzing data by a specific location, or analyzing data for a set of store locations.
I focused on:
After prioritization efforts with the team and gathering feedback from initial wireframes, I created high-fidelity screens and prototypes. Within the first release, the top priorities were:
After the MVP was released and finalized, the next release involved including additional insights and features to improve the overall experience and functionality of Merchant Portal.
Future release features included:
As the sole UX designer, I helped establish the initial experience and information architecture for a new merchant-facing platform, translating operational requirements and stakeholder insights into a structured product experience.
This project challenged me to balance the needs of businesses with very different scales while planning for increasingly complex workflows and data.
My biggest takeaway was that effective B2B UX isn't about removing complexity entirely. It's about making complex systems understandable by helping users find the information they need, complete essential tasks, and make informed decisions.
Things I would continue exploring include validating key workflows with merchants directly, evaluating how efficiently users can navigate multi-location data, and measuring whether reporting and self-service capabilities improve the merchant experience.
If you like what you see and want to work together, let's get in touch!
uiuxtiff@gmail.com