VAGARO
Integrating with Third Party Vendors to Create a Product Marketplace
From business decisions, vibe coding early designs, to anticipating key edge cases, how I was able to navigate partnering with third party vendors and development to create a commerce ecosystem for both B2B and B2B2C.
ROLE
Design Lead
TIMELINE
Apr 2024 - Jun 2024
OVERVIEW
As Lead Designer, I created Vagaro's Product Marketplace, a strategic initiative to partner with third-party distributors like SalonCentric and CosmoProf and increase Vagaro's market share and revenue.
Close collaboration with development was necessary for this project. I designed both user flows and detailed API flows to ensure seamless technical integration. This systems thinking approach allowed me to preemptively plan for complex edge cases like smart search, multi-vendor orders, and intricate return flows, ultimately ensuring a scalable marketplace experience.
01 | BACKGROUND
Strategic partnerships was a big focus for Vagaro in 2025
With the majority of Vagaro's businesses being in the salon and beauty industry, a major focus this year was securing enterprise-level partnerships, presenting a significant opportunity to both grow Vagaro's market share as well as forge important connections with the industry's key players.
02 | CONTEXT
From Broad Integrations to a Focused Marketplace
Our initial focus centered on how Vagaro could integrate with diverse third-party vendors. Early brainstorming sessions led to the exploration of various concepts, including a social messaging app, an educational platform, and a product marketplace.
Social Messaging App
Educational Platform
Product Marketplace
We settled on the idea of the Product Marketplace early on due to its inherent flexibility, allowing us to support both direct B2B ordering and B2B2C dropshipping models.
03 | UTILIZING AI
Early concept meetings with these external partners meant that I had to jump immediately to high fidelity designs.
The partnerships team needed high level visual concepts to pitch the integrations with external stakeholders. Due to the quick turnaround time needed for these concepts, I leveraged AI tools to help me come up with working prototypes.
Here I asked ChatGPT to help me get started.
This allowed me to get immediate stakeholder feedback without sacrificing the level of detail needed for the critical early discussions.
These were a couple of the early flows that I showed to these external stakeholders.
04 | USER INTERVIEWS
Interviews revealed a huge factor: loyalty points!
The salon owners were super connected to their current vendors because they earn points for rewards. This makes them really hesitant to jump ship and buy from different places.
This insight helped shape two key design decisions:
To enable users to continue earning loyalty points, a mandatory login process is essential
Salon owners want to be able to link their vendor account before making any purchase ordersto make sure they get their points.
Salon owners don't need many options on the B2B2C side.
Businesses don't really care what products they dropship, they just want something easy to set up that will bring in passive income.
05 | WORKING WITH DEVELOPMENT
Collaborating with engineering to design for API requirements
To make sure my designs were actually buildable, I had weekly syncs with an engineer. Every little design change had implications for the APIs, so this constant back-and-forth was essential for both of us.
For example, a seemingly simple refund flow required a detailed outline of all the API calls involved.
Next to my normal design annotations, I included clear, step-by-step guidelines for every API call between Vagaro and the vendor.
06 | SYSTEM THINKING
Anticipating Edge Cases and Future Growth
Having to account for both B2B and B2B2C flows as well as keeping in mind that different vendors that we partner with in the future might have different opinions, I spent a lot of time trying to fully anticipate any and all edge cases related to these different areas. Some of the things I considered are as follows:
SCALING FOR FUTURE
Utilizing AI Tools to search for products outside of our immediate catalog.
I advocated for the adoption of AI tools like ChatGPT to recognize products beyond our immediate database, setting us up for future expansion.
EDGE CASES
Return Flows Differ Based on the Vendors' Return Policies
Dropshipped returns were another concern that varied based on the return policies of each vendor. Where does the product actually go – back to the salon or directly to the vendor? What about vendors with strict no-return policies?
I created a flow chart to identify what flow to follow based on different vendors' return policies.
EDGE CASES
Handling Orders with Multiple Vendors
End users might get confused if one order results in multiple receipts, therefore while we would track the shipments separately on the backend, the user would ultimately still see the separate shipments as the same order.
07 | FINAL DESIGNS