<h1>Solving Depop's Missing Feature: Personalized Seller Stats</h1>

<h2>Background</h2>
<p>Depop is one of the biggest cloth reseller applications on the market. Millions of sellers and tens of millions of active users, this app empowers individuals to easily post and sell clothes. Whether the clothes are old gems collecting dust in the closet or diamond in the rough finds at your local thrift store, Depop is the go-to place for selling those items. They've really found their market niche and excelled, but they're still lacking one critical piece of functionality: personalized seller stats.</p>
<p>Personalized seller stats would allow sellers to look at their shop's performance, trends, and profits that would allow their sellers to make more informed decisions when acquiring, posting, and pricing their items. Even very simple statistics would be quite informative for sellers. Best selling brands, sizes, and categories are just some stats that would be majorly helpful for sellers.</p>
<p>Being surrounded by Depop sellers for years now, I've been acutely aware that there is a need for this. Years ago there wasn't even an easy way to see how much profit a seller made over a certain period of time. While they have improved on this slightly, there is still so much to be desired.</p>
<p>For this very purpose, around 6 years ago I created Mepop Reports. The initial goal was to easily analyze profits but it quickly evolved. As traction grew among sellers, user feedback drove the product to be more of an analysis of shop sales rather than strictly a tool for profit/revenue.</p>
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    <img src="/assets/blog/mepop/profit-overview.png" class="img-bordered">
    <img src="/assets/blog/mepop/monthly-profits.png" class="img-bordered">
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<h2>The Technicals</h2>
<h3>Data aggregation</h3>
<p>The initial challenge of this project was the lack of any public Depop API. I explored several ways around this but finally settled on a CSV data import method for obtaining seller info. Depop allows sellers to export CSVs of all their sales. The exact details of the CSV have changed over time but all in all, it's remained a table of all sales made through the seller's account. Each row in the table has a good amount of data on that sale, and this allowed me to be quite flexible on the data I showed to the user.</p>
<p>While a CSV import was not the most user-friendly method of obtaining the data, it ended up being pretty effective and not as much of a barrier for the user as I had anticipated. I initially believed requiring users to access their Depop account, download their CSVs (limited to 3-month intervals), and then return to Mepop to upload them would result in a loss of user engagement. While I probably did lose some users to this, it wasn't a huge problem. The options for visualizing your sales were: 1) setting up a custom Excel sheet and importing your CSVs manually, or 2) using Mepop Reports. Mepop was clearly the easier choice between the two, and the rapid flocking of users early on to my platform was staunch proof of this.</p>
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    <img src="/assets/blog/mepop/paypal-fees.png" class="img-bordered" style='flex:1'>
    <img src="/assets/blog/mepop/sales-by-category.png" class="img-bordered" style='flex:1'>
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<h3>Tech stack</h3>
<p>At the time of building this, my easiest and best option to get it off the ground was to use Firebase as my backend. Firebase provided a simple-to-use database that I could spin up easily and host automatically through their platform. While Firebase isn't optimal for lots of projects, it ended up working pretty well for Mepop Reports. I offloaded as much onto the client and only stored critical data in Firebase. With auth, analytics, and domain management built-in, this got the app spun up pretty quickly.</p>
<p>For the first few years, I didn't even need any Firebase functions and almost exclusively used it for managing auth and storing files. All file processing/data aggregation was done client-side. Later on, I ended up wanting to optimize some of my Stripe integration and webhook integration, so I was forced to create some functions. This set me up for some marginal risk, and I realized that if the app's user base did grow 10x or so I would probably have to move off of Firebase and into something cheaper to host. So far, this hasn't been a problem.</p>
<p>The heavy-hitter technologies on the client were Next.js, React, Redux, and Recharts. Pretty classic and simple at the end of the day.</p>
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<h2>Recent overhaul and current update</h2>
<p>Remember how I mentioned seeing some new Stripe integrations after building? This was due to my experimentation with the onboarding. In an effort to move away from the free tier that was initially offered, and promote a free trial followed by a $9/month subscription, I had to make some changes. I started tracking how far the user would get into onboarding. This insight allowed me to see any weak links of the initial user flow that needed to be optimized. I changed the onboarding, user creation, and Stripe customer creation logic several times over. This was an ongoing process because I was constantly trying new UX tweaks to see how conversion rates were affected. Usually, these new onboarding optimizations would require the overhaul of some other aspect of the onboarding flow. So there was lots of tinkering and probably four serious refactors of the onboarding flow. It was a good learning experience to go over the flow repeatedly and, based on user experience, make improvements time and time again. Successful onboarding rates ended up nearly doubling by the end of the process.</p>
<p>Now it basically is running itself. As I get user feedback (via Discord, email, or otherwise), I'll try to implement the feedback and build the feature or whatever else is requested. It's smooth sailing for the most part.</p>
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<h2>The Future</h2>
<p>It's unclear at the moment what the future holds. Depop looks to be building their own version of seller stat tracking, and I'm not sure where that will leave us. It's shocking they haven't done it sooner, honestly. There's no way of knowing exactly what they'll end up doing (if anything), but for now, we're riding the wave and providing this much-needed tool for Depop sellers.</p>
<p>Feel free to check it out and let us know what you think: <a href="https://www.mepopreports.com">mepopreports.com</a></p>