A rapid growth platform of manufacturers, merchants, and contractors. Better connected and more efficient. TradeKart is digitising the construction industry.
Opportunity
TradeKart is Deliveroo for construction products. It enables trades people to order from a catalog containing thousands of products from their phone and have it delivered within two hours without leaving the site. This saves an enormous amount of time travelling to builders merchants, and as we know time is money. Moreover TradeKart Pro, the company's premium service, enables larger contractors to have an organisation wide account. Key features include shared payment methods, approval flows, and consolidated record keeping. The platform launched in early 2022 and is now live across London with 8 building merchants and a rapidly growing customer base.
Key achievements
- Idea to launch MVP in 3 months.
- 8 Merchants, payments and logistics connected.
- Thousands of users within months of launch.
- Rapid growth and industry disruption.
Strategy
TradeKart was founded by Alistair McAuley, previously Managing Director of Dulux. He approached Hack and Craft with his vision for bringing last mile logistics to the trade industry. Working in partnership we began the first phase of H&C’s 5 phase process, the Strategy Phase. We mapped out the current value stream for merchants and tradespeople and identified the pain points in the current process. We then created a map of the potential value stream that the TradeKart platform could enable. That potential value stream map became the basis for the follow on Design phase.
Design
In the Design phase we created wireframes and fully designed click dummies for the customer app and merchant web portal. This was built in short sprints with feedback from Alistair and the wider TradeKart team. As part of the process we also analysed and diagrammed the key logistical and financial processes. Which included complexities such as partial refunds of multi-merchant orders and optimising the delivery fleet working across multiple geographic areas. At the conclusion of the design phase we had the UX, process, and technical architecture fully designed and were ready to begin the development phase.
Interactive prototypeIterative development
The Development phase proceeded through a series of two week sprints each starting with a planning meeting and concluding with a deployment in a demo environment. Within 3 months we built and launched the app. It contained full integration with payments (Stripe), merchants, and logistics providers. Customers rapidly adopted the seamless app on both Android and iOS and merchants were trained in the use of the Merchant portal through which they could manage and process the incoming orders.
Impact
Since launch TradeKart has become one of the fastest growing startups in the sector. We have added rapid onboarding capabilities for new merchants as well as marketplace analytics and manufacturer integrations. We also provide 24/7 support, reporting, and uptime guarantees through our Continuous Delivery service. By working through H&C’s phased methodology with our exceptional product designers and engineers TradeKart has gone from an idea to a scalable industry platform which is already disrupting the market.