Bargain Rani · Process

The full process

The research, personas and flows behind Bargain Rani. The case study covers the decisions; this is the work underneath them.

02 — Discovery & Research

What the Rani actually wants

The persona work refused the flattering version. She is not a deal-hunting gamer who wants to haggle for sport — she is time-poor, sceptical from experience, and quietly negotiating everywhere else in her life. Bargaining is only appealing if it costs her nothing when she cannot be bothered.

She has already been burned
Prior bad experiences with sizing and fakes mean trust signals must arrive before the fun does. A discount from a seller she doubts is not a discount.
Negotiation is a skill she has
Offline she reads the seller, opens below her target and settles. The interface should let her use that skill, not teach her a new game.
Not everyone wants to haggle
A meaningful share would rather set a price and walk away. Designing only for live negotiation would have excluded them entirely.
Safety is part of the purchase
Discreet packaging, hidden order history and masked contact details are not edge cases — for some buyers they decide whether the order happens.

03 — Defining the Opportunity

Trust is Pillar 0.

The strategic call that shaped everything: bargaining is the hook, trust is the job. If the platform wins the negotiation and loses the return, she never comes back — so the trust infrastructure was specified before the mechanic that gets attention.

01
Make asking feel normal
Negotiation had to read as a first-class, expected action — presented with the same weight as Buy, never as a discount hunt.
02
Hedge the core hypothesis
Live haggling is an assumption, not a fact. The product needed a second mode that works if the assumption proves wrong.
03
Prove fairness structurally
A claim of a fair price is worthless. It had to be backed by a mechanism the buyer can verify after the fact.
04
Let supply become demand
Any buyer should be able to become a seller in minutes, without that path becoming a security hole.

04 — Design Strategy

Earn the trust,
then offer the game.

The strategy inverts the obvious order. Trust mechanics are specified and built first; bargaining is layered on top as the thing that makes the platform memorable rather than the thing that makes it work.

01
Establish the guarantee
The Price-Fairness Guarantee — auto-refund if the item sells cheaper within 24 hours — was designed before the bargaining UI, because it is what makes any agreed price defensible.
02
Give sellers a face
Women-Owned verification and named shops turn an anonymous listing into a person you negotiated with. Negotiation without a counterparty is just a form.
03
Design two negotiation modes
Live Bargain for the buyer who enjoys it; Name Your Price for the one who does not. Both are first-class, neither is a fallback.
04
Push authority server-side
Roles, price floors and refunds are enforced in the database, not the client — so the trust promises cannot be bypassed from a browser.
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