H&B Marketplace and Delivery by Seller (DBS)
By enabling partners to ship directly to customers, we significantly increased product variety without the need for internal inventory, while maintaining the trusted H&B experience by ensuring partner fulfillment met our established standards for reliability and quality.
Role:
Lead Product Designer
Platform:
Responsive Web, iOS, & Android
Collaborators:
Search, PDP, Basket/Checkout, Customer squads
Tools:
Figma, UXTweak, Figma Make, AI Tools
Status:
Live
CHALLENGE
Holland & Barrett’s transition from a single-retailer to a Marketplace model significantly expanded the product range but created three critical UX friction points:
Delivery Fragmentation: Inconsistent fees and shipping speeds within a single order.
Journey Complexity: Introducing third-party sellers added significant layers of complexity to standard, well-established user journeys.
Fulfillment Limits: Third-party items did not support the popular Click & Collect service.
The Goal
Unify the Marketplace transition by resolving delivery fragmentation, third-party journey complexity, and Click & Collect gaps into a seamless, scalable checkout.
user-centric validation
Testing and Validation
I partnered with a UX Researcher to conduct moderated usability testing (6 participants) using:
Low-fi wireframes to validate core logic.
Competitive audits to benchmark established marketplace patterns.
The Reality Check
The "seamless" approach we envisioned hit two major roadblocks:
Ignored Badging: Users completely overlooked marketplace identifiers.
Cognitive Overload: The streamlined flow overwhelmed users at the final stages.
3 Key Insights from Testing
Brand Blindness: Users missed marketplace status until "split fulfillment" at checkout.
The Delivery Trap: Users expected a single £25 free delivery threshold, not per seller.
The Journey Wall: Users struggled to distinguish "collection" vs. "delivery" for mixed items.
SOLUTION
Phase 1: Creating a Visual Language (Clarity & Consistency)
I started by designing a Universal Badge System.
The Struggle: Heavy icons cluttered the mobile UI.
The Pivot: Switched to a subtle, text-based "Sold & Delivered by" tag, improving accessibility and reducing visual noise.
Phase 2: Solving the Basket Complexity
The most complex area was the Basket & Checkout. When a user has an H&B item (Click & Collect) and a Seller item (Home Delivery), the UI often breaks.
Decision: Implemented Grouped Seller Logic to visually box items by fulfiller.
Reasoning: Transparently justifies split delivery fees, turning "hidden costs" into a logical result of the user's choices.
Phase3: The "Mixed Checkout"
Managing a single transaction containing both Click & Collect (H&B) and Home Delivery (Marketplace) items.
The Challenge: Unifying two separate engines into a "Multi-Stream" journey within a traditionally linear flow.
The Fix: Bridged legacy backend gaps with a UI that intuitively handles split-order fulfillment.
The Solution: Sequential Fulfillment
I introduced a staged flow to simplify the mental model:
Step 1: Confirm H&B collection point.
Step 2: "Unlock" the Seller’s shipping address section.
This created a seamless hybrid experience while maintaining technical separation between fulfillment streams.
Phase 4: Post-Purchase Trust
Once the order is placed, the "H&B Brand Promise" is at its most vulnerable. If a user receives one item but not the other, they may think the order is lost.
The Shift: Moved from a "Simple List" to a status-based hierarchy for Order History and Emails.
The Logic: Applied accordions to group orders by status, hiding complexity while maintaining scannability.
PACKAGE 1 (H&B): "Ready for Collection at [Store Name]".
PACKAGE 2 (Seller): "Dispatched - Track with [Carrier]" for the Marketplace item.
Outcomes and Evolution
Collaborative impact and Reflections
As the Lead Designer, I acted as the "connective tissue" between several product squads (Search, PDP, P13n, and Checkout), each with competing KPIs. While the Search squad prioritized page load speeds, the Checkout squad focused strictly on conversion. To align these teams under a unified vision, I facilitated a series of cross-squad workshops and frequent stakeholder reviews. Navigating this was a high-pressure challenge, as I had to balance tight delivery deadlines with rigid technical constraints while ensuring the user experience was functional and beautiful.
Outcomes and lessons learned
Commercial Growth: The platform generated £1.16M GMV in the last financial year and has already scaled to £3.1M in the current fiscal year.
Inventory Expansion: We successfully launched 1,845 SKUs and onboarded 100+ live sellers, with a pipeline of over 400 more.
What I’d do differently: If I were to revisit this phase, I would have pushed for an even quicker checkout process to further reduce the friction of split fulfillment. I would also have improved the stakeholder review process by establishing more frequent, smaller touchpoints to navigate the complex cross-squad dependencies more efficiently under tight deadlines.