How our marketplace design helped Kingpin connect brands and retailers worldwide

A wholesale marketplace has to sell itself to two audiences with opposite goals: brands looking for buyers, and retailers looking for products. A single generic homepage leaves both unsure whether Kingpin is built for them, and uncertain visitors do not sign up. 

We designed the homepage to split the choice at the door, with two clear paths alongside direct prompts to request a demo or sign up. Each visitor reaches a message written for their side of the marketplace, so more of the right people create accounts and fewer leave to work out where they belong.

Before a retailer commits to a brand, they need to know fast whether it fits them: what it sells, the wholesale cost against the retail price, the minimum order, and when new collections drop. When those answers are spread across pages, retailers hesitate and brands lose the sale. 

We designed the brand pages to hold everything in one view: category tags, wholesale and retail price ranges, minimum order value, and active and previous collections, with each product card showing its own wholesale and retail price. Retailers can follow the brand, book a meeting, or add products to the cart without leaving the page, so brands convert high intent clients into orders sooner.

Wholesale runs on dates and dollars: collection deadlines, orders in progress, units shipped, and money owed. When those live in separate tools, people miss a deadline or lose track of what a partner owes, and deals slip. 

We designed the Kingpin dashboard as the home base for both brands and retailers, pulling all the key metrics into one screen, with an onboarding checklist and guided tour to get new users to their first order sooner. A built-in referral card rewards users for inviting retailers, with zero commission on a new partner's first order, so the marketplace grows from the people already on it.

Wholesale ordering has long run on email threads and spreadsheets passed back and forth, where a missed message or a wrong cell costs an order. 

Our team built ordering into Kingpin so retailers place and pre-order upcoming collections against clear deadlines, and both sides track every order in one dashboard. Brands no longer rebuild the picture from their inbox, and retailers lock in collections before they sell out. The time saved on chasing paperwork goes back into selling and into the relationships behind repeat orders.

A marketplace only earns when brands and retailers keep coming back, and paid ads alone make every new sign-up expensive. 

We built a blog into Kingpin, where useful content draws in people searching for wholesale answers and gives existing members a reason to return between orders. Kingpin grows into the place to learn the business, and the cost of winning each new customer drops.