Onkar Singh Lohtham

Local Supplies is a multi-vendor, online marketplace for local shops. While supermarket online sales increased by 69%, 80% of independent convenience stores had no online channel. There was no single solution to onboard the 71% unaffiliated, independent local shops. I conceptualized, designed, and launched an online eCommerce platform to fill this gap.

This marketplace allows grocery stores, garden centers, and convenience stores to set up their online shops in just under three days. They can upload their products and images and run discount and basket campaigns to build their local customer base within a 5-to-7-mile radius, offering them click-and-collect and home delivery options.

When customers search by postal code, all the available stores become visible, and they can place an order. They can buy from multiple shops in one transaction, avoid going to the shops, and shop in their trusted local shops from the comfort of their homes.

This project involved business management, retail operations, stock management, legal, vendor marketing, customer marketing, technical front-end and back-end user journeys, bulk data import, Stripe Payment, vendor management, vendor registration and onboarding, and end-to-end order management.

Over 50 pricing reporters working for a 100-year-old metal commodity pricing publisher used disjointed Excel sheets and manual processes to capture, review, and publish commodity pricing data, providing industry benchmarks to buy and sell metal commodities.

This was a digital transformation project to build an online workflow tool that could be used seamlessly by 50+ reporters in 16 countries and adhere to the strict IOSCO guidelines for price reporting and publishing.

I conceptualized the product architecture and user journeys and streamlined complex reporting procedures into one uniform process. To start, I spoke with 20+ pricing reporters, customers, and pricing editors to understand the business domain and designed the new online workflow tool that could be used by multiple reporters and departments in several countries simultaneously.

The project included the front-end price reporting workflow, back-end data capture and storage, time-sensitive price publication, and an intuitive admin system allowing editors of various domains to add their commodities with specific attributes and business rules. As an early adopter of the digital workflow tool, the firm leveraged superior data insights and became an industry leader.

Reed.co.uk had implemented Elasticsearch to power its job search function on a B2C job portal. The job search results were poor, leading to many customer complaints and loss of trust in the data shown. This was bleeding the conversion rate and causing a lower ROI on marketing spend.

I analyzed the existing search mechanism and sifted through thousands of customer complaints to distill the business problem into four specific areas: job search, location search, job alert relevance, and data quality. Then I prioritized the issues, discussed the roadmap with the technical search team, and devised a plan to migrate eight million saved searches and job alerts.

Next, I devised a product release plan in tranches of one million to minimize risk. Upon the product launch, the metrics were analyzed and showed a significant improvement in the quality of search results. The search funnel saw a drastic improvement: job clicks increased by 16% and application completion increased by 12%.

A parallel project was run for three months, using Google Search on a different cohort of customers. My search project metrics and the quality of search results beat the Google Search implementation, so we shut down the Google Search project.