A marketplace app vendors actually use

Market Yard connects small retailers with local wholesale suppliers, but its first attempt at a vendor app was effectively a desktop ordering system squeezed onto a phone screen. Stallholders, who often shared one phone between two or three people working a stall, found it slow to use standing up between customers, and orders were getting missed.

We started by mapping how vendors actually work a shift: short bursts of attention between serving customers, spotty connectivity in some market areas, and a strong preference for glancing at a stock number rather than reading a paragraph. The navigation had to feel obvious from the first tap, with no onboarding tutorial anyone would realistically sit through.

The redesigned flow puts the three actions vendors use constantly, check stock, place a reorder, confirm a delivery, on one home screen instead of behind a hamburger menu. Order confirmation works even on a weak connection, queuing the request and syncing the moment signal returns, so a vendor never has to wonder if an order actually went through.

We built and tested on the actual mid-range Android devices vendors use day to day, not just high-end test phones, catching slowdowns and layout issues that only show up on real hardware in a real market, not in a clean office demo.

From wireframes through Play Store submission, we stayed hands-on until the app was stable in daily use across Market Yard's supplier network. The measure of success was never how the app looked in a pitch deck; it was whether a vendor mid-shift could place a reorder in a few taps without asking anyone for help.