our new marketplace makes it even easier to find business support

We are happy to announce the launch of our new Service Providers Marketplace - the best directory of business support services for e-⁠residents!

Outsourcing business administration is a useful way to easily, quickly, and more effectively start and manage your business. For e-⁠residents, this is especially helpful to navigate your cross-border business ventures. The e-⁠Residency team have over the years built up a diverse and growing business directory of service providers - which we call the Marketplace.

This week, we're excited to announce that we have relaunched the Service Providers Marketplace with brand new features and tools, all based on feedback from e-⁠residents and service providers.

Our aim with these changes was to make it even easier for e-⁠residents to start and manage their companies in Estonia. This way, you can concentrate on growing your business, while experienced and knowledgeable service providers handle all the administration.

As the Product Manager for this relaunch, I wanted to tell you about the evolution of the e-⁠Residency Marketplace from 2019 to today - and give you some insights into the new and changed features.

Brief history of the e-⁠Residency Marketplace

I’ve been with e-⁠Residency for 5 years now and seen all 3 versions of the Marketplace - a tool that lists services from different service providers to help e-⁠residents start and run their companies. 

I am not sure when the first version went live exactly but looking at the design it was probably in the early stages of e-⁠Residency. (Editor's Note: it was in January 2019!)

As you can see from the image of the old Marketplace here, the number of service providers was significantly lower than now. The design had some clear benefits - it was simple and easy to navigate, suitable for a small number of service providers.

But as the programme grew, we added more and more service providers to the Marketplace. This brought some issues from both e-⁠residents’ and service providers’ perspective. E-⁠residents wanted a more accurate filtering and sorting system to find the best service provider for their needs. Service providers were not happy with the long, growing, and static list view, which meant that their company might not get much visibility. 

When I joined the team in 2019, the new Marketplace design was in the works and I had the honour of finishing the process in 2020, when we went live with the Marketplace v2.

The new version had a more layered and accurate filtering and sorting system. Plus, we added a review and rating feature to Marketplace service providers’ profiles, so their clients could leave reviews. This feature also became the basis of how the service providers were sorted on the main page. The initial user testing for the new Marketplace showed good results and many of the previous shortcomings were fixed.

But nothing is ever perfect, the programme keeps growing, and our clients’ needs keep evolving. And our team is always looking for ways to improve the tools we provide e-⁠residents to succeed in business!

Introducing the Service Providers Marketplace v3

Through continuous user testing it became clear to us that there was room for improvement on version 2 of the Marketplace. Some of the new features proved to be a bottleneck in the process of onboarding new e-⁠residents, so we decided to go back to the drawing board and see how we could improve it.

So, what has changed in version 3?

The first thing you'll notice is the new front page on the Marketplace.

The goal of the front page is to give guidance to our clients who are just starting out and are not sure what kind of services they need to start a company as an e-resident. It has an overview of all the services, a search bar, links to the most popular services, and guides to choosing suitable service providers. All of these new features are designed with new e-⁠residents in mind - and we hope it helps them to more easily and quickly find the services and business support they need.

Users of the previous Marketplace also told us that it wasn’t clear to them which were the more important or most popular services. To address this, we now have a separate section for most popular services on the front page. 

The two features that received most criticism in the previous version of the Marketplace, were filtering and comparison. We were told by users that the filters were not visible enough.

So for the new version, we opened the filters up, meaning that now you can see 2 levels of filters without having to click anything open. We also moved the filters to the left side of the page as our research of different marketplaces showed us that this is a well understood UX design and navigation choice. Furthermore, we restructured the filter categories so that the necessary services to start a company are under a separate section.

A major new feature of the new Marketplace is the introduction of a dedicated page for service provider 'Packages'. Of course, the service providers already offered packages before. However, the only way our e-⁠residents could see them was by viewing them on a service provider’s profile page. Since packages are the most popular option to buy services from a service provider, e-⁠residents using the new Marketplace can filter and sort between packages in addition to single services.

Another thing that has changed from v2 to v3 is the 'Compare' feature. Comparison view is now more organised and the user flow from selecting services/service providers/packages to compare, is more intuitive. 

What's next for the Marketplace?

The live version of the new Service Providers Marketplace is only scope 1 of its total revamp. We have more features and useful tools planned soon!

The next steps include:

1. redesigning the service providers' individual profile pages
2. making changes to the review/rating system
3. investigating a system for Marketplace visitors to save the service profiles they plan to revisit during the selection period. 

We are very excited for these upcoming features, and hopefully you will like them too!

If you would like to comment on any of the new features or have other suggestions, please use the feedback pop-up window on the Marketplace. I urge everyone to visit and leave your feedback so that we can be sure we are on the right track and also better understand what still needs to be tuned to your needs.