B2B commerce, wholesale platform
Talabatty
Wholesale groceries delivered to businesses across Kuwait. The buyer is a restaurant or a retail chain with a credit limit, minimum order quantities and five branches to supply, which makes almost every consumer shopping pattern the wrong answer.
- Client
- Talabatty
- Sector
- B2B wholesale, Kuwait
- Scope
- Product design, design system
- Role
- Nibin Nelson
01 The problem
The buyer is not a shopper
A restaurant buying two hundred kilos of chicken on credit has almost nothing in common with someone buying dinner, and consumer commerce patterns quietly assume the second one.
Credit changes the whole shape of the interface. These accounts run on a limit, two and a half thousand dinars in the case we designed against, and how much of it remains decides whether an order can happen at all. A cart that only reveals the problem at checkout wastes the buyer's afternoon.
Minimum quantities change what a price even means. Twenty five litres, ten kilos, fifty pieces. A number next to a product is meaningless until you know the unit it attaches to, and unit price against case price is the single most reliable way to make a wholesale buyer order the wrong amount.
Browsing is also the wrong primary action. A kitchen orders roughly the same list every week. Search and categories matter, but they are not the job. Repeat is the job, and burying it under discovery makes the frequent task the slow one.
Then the accounts stop being one shape. A single outlet and a chain running five branches with fifty users are not the same customer. The chain needs branch level ordering, user permissions and consolidated financial reporting; the single outlet needs none of it and should never have to see it.
All of it bilingual, Arabic and English with a full right to left flip, and spanning three audiences at once: the businesses buying, the vendors supplying, and the businesses not signed up yet.
02 The approach
Reorder first, browse second
Signing in lands the buyer on a dashboard, not a storefront. Order Again and Most Ordered Items sit near the top with a reorder button on every card, so the weekly task takes one screen. Categories and search stay available for the genuinely new purchase, which is the rarer event.
Credit was promoted to a permanent, glanceable figure with its usage drawn against it, rather than a number buried in an account page. Knowing the headroom before building a basket is the difference between a smooth order and an abandoned one.
Every product card states its minimum quantity next to the price, in the unit that actually applies. It is a small piece of type that removes an entire category of ordering error, and it lets a buyer scan a row of products without doing mental arithmetic on each one.
Order states were made concrete and countable. Ongoing, out for delivery, delivered, cancelled, returned, failed, each with a live number on the dashboard. When your stock depends on a delivery, ambiguity about where an order sits is the thing that generates phone calls.
The multi-branch account became its own shape rather than a heavier version of the same screen. Branch and user counts, a financial report with sale views across today, yesterday, seven and thirty days, and reporting that consolidates the branches a head office actually has to answer for.
Acquisition was separated from the product entirely. The partner landing page explains how it works, what the benefits are and captures business name, type, branches and contact in one form, so a prospective partner never has to navigate an application built for people who already have an account.
- Buyer dashboard and reorder flow
- Credit limit and usage model
- Product cards with minimum quantities
- Order state system and tracking
- Multi-branch accounts and user roles
- Financial reporting views
- Arabic and right to left layout system
- Partner acquisition landing and sign-up
03 The outcome
An order in one screen
The weekly order stopped being a shopping trip.
Because the dashboard leads with what the business bought last time, and credit headroom and minimum quantities are visible before anything enters the basket, a repeat order is a handful of clicks rather than a rebuild of the same list.
Separating the multi-branch account from the single outlet is what makes that possible. One customer gets branch reporting and user management, the other never sees a control that does not apply to them, and neither is paying for the other's complexity.
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