Ofofo Marketplace: Fixing the Journeys People Were Abandoning

The Leaking Funnel

Ofofo's cybersecurity marketplace was live and already leaking, with at 73%. Onboarding was rough: 83.5% of new users dropped off before they became buyers or sellers. The checkout lost people at the exact moment they had decided to spend money. And the marketplace was confusing to navigate: buyers could not tell where to start, sellers registered as buyers by mistake, and the site's structure reflected how the company thought rather than how its users shopped.

Finding the Breaks

3 pieces of groundwork located where and why the experience was failing. The platform served 2 audiences and treated them as one. On the buying side, the core persona is not a security expert. They run a small company or a 50-person business, they have been told they need a or a compliance certificate to close an enterprise deal, and they are one bad acronym away from giving up. On the selling side sat 2 personas in one door: security companies with catalogues of offerings, and individual consultants such as selling themselves. Naming these explained the dropoffs. Buyers bounced because the site spoke jargon to people who do not speak it. Sellers mis-registered because the platform never asked who they were until it was too late. Onboarding leaked because it demanded enterprise-length forms from people who wanted to look around. Mapping the journeys end to end gave every screen a place in a journey rather than a place in a sitemap. I mapped the buyer's path from "I have a security problem" to purchase and the seller's from landing to first sale, then drew the whole platform as one task flow.

The map forced the two decisions that mattered most. First, the odd front door had to go: the old header offered "Sign In", "Buyer" and "Become a Seller" as three parallel choices, and people picked wrong constantly. The redesign gave both sides one registration flow forking at a single "select user type" step, with an optional profile form for buyers, a form for sellers, and role switching built in from day one. If people will get the door wrong, make changing rooms cheap. Second, the map argued for asking commitment only after delivering value: optional profiles, coupons deferred to checkout, and a guest checkout path designed down to the email-and- detail. Guest checkout never shipped, and no research killed it: the CEO ruled that a cybersecurity purchase must carry buyer details. A judgement call, not a finding. Card sorting settled how people actually grouped what we sold. Three in , one with the dev team and two with the executive team, six participants each writing and sorting their own cards.

The convergence was the finding. Search, filters, categories, pricing and testimonials formed near-identical clusters across both cohorts, which told us the core was not controversial, it just had never been applied. The seller-as-buyer registration confusion surfaced here independently too, confirming the journey map. And the executives kept reaching for hotel-booking comparisons, which became the benchmark for how shopping should feel. Seller-side cloning of offerings was parked for the admin panel, again on judgement rather than evidence, because other features were prioritised.

The Buying Journey

The browse-and-evaluate journey was rebuilt across 3 design cycles. A bake-off picked the layout. The stage set a persistent sidebar of filters beside list results against a filter panel behind a button with a card grid. The sidebar read like enterprise software, precisely the feeling scaring our persona away. The grid read like shopping, and won, with applied filters surfacing as removable chips.

Cycle 1 rebuilt browse around how the buyer actually arrives: with a rough problem, not a product name. A structured discovery bar sat above a category rail and a "Popular deals" carousel, and the grid always opened with an honest count, because a buyer who cannot tell how big the shop is cannot tell whether it is worth their time. The offering card carries a lot of weight, because a security offering is not a t-shirt, and its pricing capsule appears identically everywhere else in the product. Buy Now and Compare sit side by side on every card, so the two most likely next steps are one glance away.

Filters are where the evaluation journey accelerates or stalls. Alongside price range and ratings, buyers filter by delivery model, support hours, frameworks and compliance coverage and, my favourite, the certifications of the people on the job, each with live counts. A price histogram anchors the range in plain language, "The average price for an offering is $400," answering the question every first-time security buyer is embarrassed to ask. The panel itself was a correction, and the one dropped direction here that evidence settled: an early version made compliance coverage the hero filter, heatmaps showed about 3 of 68 users ever clicked it, and every facet moved into one consolidated modal where they work together. Even the dead end got designed: the zero-results state offers "Get Custom Quotation", turning a failed search into a lead rather than apologising.

Cycle 1 proved the journey, Cycle 2 made it fast. Buyers arrive with a task, not a query, so the four-field discovery bar gave way to a single conversational search, the tall hero banner went, and category discovery moved into a mega-menu with live offering counts. The page dropped from 5,197 pixels tall to 3,450: a third less scrolling between a buyer and the inventory.

Earning the Purchase

The second half of the journey is where the original funnel leaked hardest. The trust moment is where security marketplaces live or die. You cannot screenshot a , and our buyer persona cannot independently judge one, so the offering detail page layers proof instead: verified-purchase badges on reviews, a ratings histogram, and a resource library where buyers preview real sample deliverables before spending anything. For services, the page credentials the humans rather than the vendor. Services also introduced , a numbered stepper with a price and deliverables per stage, and that one component reappears across the detail page, the comparison table and checkout, so a buyer meets the same mental model everywhere.

The comparison page brings the evaluation step into the product. Our journey map showed it happening off-platform, in two discovery calls and a spreadsheet. Three columns, each swappable from a dropdown, with a dashed "Select Offerings" slot inviting the third. Attributes group into tinted bands, and absence is communicated two ways: a dash for what a vendor lacks, and greyed-out text for unsupported items inside a checklist, so "does not have it" and "does not cover this part" stay distinguishable at a glance.

Checkout was an original dropoff point, and it assumed one pricing shape in a marketplace that sells four. The redesign keeps the layout invariant, an order table beside a summary card, and lets only the price details block mutate. Zero-dollar offerings keep the full flow with a $0 total, because a free security assessment still needs billing details and consent. Milestone engagements show the full value ($19,600) but total only the first milestone ($1,000), keeping the commitment honest and the first payment small. Discounts defer coupon entry to a quiet hint bar. Subscriptions with trials earn dual totals reading "Total after trial $100" and "Total due today $0", with the relabelled from Checkout to Subscribe. On mobile the flow becomes a three-step stepper, and the failure state names the exact purchase that failed and leads with a retry.

Security purchases are considered purchases, and the map showed a long quiet gap between "interested" and "paid". The chat system fills that gap with a docked widget and a three-tab inbox for general, order and support threads. Order threads pin the order ID so the conversation stays anchored to the transaction, and pre-sale threads open from an offering context chip, so a seller always knows which listing a buyer is asking about.

Once it was clear buyers arrive with a task rather than a query, the landing page pivoted from a browse-first pitch to a job-first one, hiring a virtual CISO in minutes.

What the Numbers Said

Every number here was measured, not felt: behaviour came from Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar, the qualitative side from feedback forms. The rebuilt marketplace UX lifted direct conversions by 56 percent and cut the from 73 percent to 41 percent, movement that came from clearer navigation and decision flows rather than any single screen. Onboarding proved the ask-later principle: letting users complete their profile when a task required it, rather than making everything mandatory, cut the onboarding drop rate from 83.5 percent to 53.1 percent. The comparison feature earned its keep, with seven of every ten buyers running a compare before purchasing. And the zero-results recovery path proved itself at scale once the system launched, with six of every ten custom requests starting from that page.

Platform Evolution

Jul 2023

Joined and audited the funnel

Defined the buyer and seller personas the live, leaking design had been missing.

Aug 2023

Journeys, task flow and card sorting

Mapped both journeys as one task flow and rebuilt the IA from three open card sorts.

Sep 2023

Lo-fi bake-off

Wireframed sidebar filters against a card grid, and the grid won for feeling like shopping.

Oct 2023

Cycle 1: the full marketplace

Shipped discovery, the offering card, the security-specific filter panel, comparison and detail pages.

Apr 2024

Checkout and chats

Rebuilt the checkout to absorb four pricing shapes without changing form, and shipped order-anchored chat.

Jun 2024

Cycle 2: shortening the path

Swapped structured search for one conversational input and cut the page height by a third.

Aug 2024

The vCISO pivot

Repositioned the landing experience from browse-the-marketplace to hire-a-vCISO.

Lessons

Dropoffs are journey problems wearing page costumes Every dropoff pointed at a screen, but no screen fix would have held. The checkout leaked because of what the journey demanded before it, and onboarding bounced because of who we imagined was filling it in. Diagnose the journey, then design the page.
Ask for commitment after value, not before Optional buyer profiles, coupons deferred to checkout, role switching for mis-registered sellers: every fix to the dropoff problem amounted to the same principle. Let people move forward first and formalise later.

FAQ

They settled the marketplace taxonomy with evidence instead of opinion, confirmed the buyer-seller registration confusion independently of the journey map, and set the experiential benchmark: executives kept comparing the filtering they wanted to hotel-booking apps, which became the bar for how shopping should feel.

By changing only one thing. The layout, the order table, the summary card and the billing flow are identical for every purchase. Only the price details block mutates: milestone splits, trial dual totals, deferred coupons. Buyers get a consistent journey, and the complexity stays contained in the one component built to express it.

Ofofo Marketplace: Fixing the Journeys People Were Abandoning

How this was worked out

The Leaking Funnel

Finding the Breaks

The Buying Journey

Earning the Purchase

What the Numbers Said

Platform Evolution

Lessons

FAQ

Design Skills

Tech Stack & Tools

Cybersecurity RFPs

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