🔄 UX Case Study — Roposo Clout · Lead UX Designer · 4 Weeks · 2025
Context
Roposo Clout is a dropshipping platform where sellers source products from suppliers and push them to their Shopify stores. When a customer places an order, the assigned supplier ships it directly.
The business started noticing a pattern: a disproportionate number of failed deliveries and resulting Return-To-Origin (RTO) charges, were coming from long-distance shipments. A customer in Punjab receiving an order dispatched from a Gujarat supplier. A customer in Delhi getting a parcel shipped from Chennai.
The logistics math was bad. But the design problem was worse. Sellers were locked into a supplier they'd chosen weeks earlier, at the time they pushed a product. The system had no ability to re-assign based on where the actual order came from.
"We weren't solving a logistics problem. We were solving a trust problem dressed up as a logistics problem."
Discovery & Research
Before any wireframes, I needed to understand how sellers thought about supplier selection. I ran a mixed-method research sprint over 2 weeks.
| Method | Key Finding |
|---|---|
| User Interviews | |
| 8 dropshippers, 45 min each | Sellers treated supplier selection as a one-time, committed decision — analogous to choosing a vendor for a physical store. Almost none had considered that their customers would come from geographically diverse locations. |
| Support Ticket Analysis | |
| Last 3 months | 10% of RTO-related complaints referenced unexpected delivery delays. Cross-referencing with order data showed a strong correlation with supplier–customer distance. Sellers were blaming product quality when the real cause was geography. |
| Session Recording Review | |
| Hotjar, 30+ sessions | When viewing the "More Suppliers" section on PDPs, sellers scrolled quickly but rarely compared supplier locations against their typical order sources. Location data was visible but not being used. |
| Stakeholder Alignment | |
| PM + Ops team | The ops team had already built a candidate supplier matching algorithm. My job was to design a surface that would get sellers to opt into it — without creating anxiety around margin changes or loss of control. |
The most revealing moment came from the interviews. When I described automatic supplier re-assignment, sellers' first reactions were almost uniformly negative:
"If the platform starts switching suppliers without asking me, how will I know if my margins are still intact? What if the quality drops? I need to know who's shipping my orders."
— Keval Shah, Mumbai | 10 active products
"I spent time comparing all the suppliers before picking one. If the system just overrides that, what was the point?"
— Numan, Delhi | ~10,000 orders/month
This gave me the core design problem in sharp focus: the feature would only succeed if sellers felt in control even when the system was making decisions.