How Forest Admin empowers non-dev team members of Ma Ville Mon Shopping to scale their operations

Executive Summary

Ma Ville Mon Shopping (MVMS) is a pioneering French marketplace designed to support independent creators and SMEs in competing with large online retailers. During the Covid-19 pandemic, MVMS played a critical role in helping local craftsmen transition to online sales.

To efficiently manage its internal operations and support its rapid growth, MVMS chose Forest Admin as a back-office solution. It has become integral to MVMS’s operations, enabling teams across the organization to manage tasks more efficiently.

We have recently interviewed Romain Laurent and Miguel Hidalgo who gave us detailed insights on how different teams (Customer Support, Marketing, Sales, Product, Dev, and even the Executive team) use Forest Admin.

About Ma Ville Mon Shopping

Ma Ville Mon Shopping (MVMS) is the first French marketplace dedicated to independent creators. However, it is much more than just a marketplace. MVMS has a bold mission to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) compete with large online retailers. In doing so, it promotes the local economy, fosters human connections, celebrates diversity, and helps to resist standardization.

Launched in 2015 and acquired by the La Poste Group (the French national postal services) in 2019, Ma Ville Mon Shopping made a significant impact on the local economy during the Covid-19 pandemic. During this period, local craftsmen had to rapidly transition to online sales, which involved managing their online presence, orders, deliveries, returns, and a host of other tasks. Today, Ma Ville Mon Shopping is no longer just a local initiative; it has grown into a national e-commerce marketplace for small business owners across France.

What made MVMS choose Forest Admin

Initially, some of the co-founders of MVMS considered building an admin panel in-house. However, CPO Romain Laurent, who was already familiar with Forest Admin, recommended it as a better solution. He knew that Forest Admin would significantly reduce the time spent on building and maintaining the back-office for business and operations teams. Drawing from his previous experience, where in-house admin panels consumed up to 20% of developer time, Romain was determined to avoid this at Ma Ville Mon Shopping.

How MVMS uses Forest Admin

The team initially needed a simple CRUD application to visualize and modify data stored in their database. However, the needs quickly grew as sales, marketing, and support teams needed to delve deep into customer data to better understand their needs and also to take actions to serve the customers better. This is possible thanks to custom Actions - a low-code Forest Admin feature that allows team members to trigger any business workflow or action.

Custom Actions to trigger business workflows

Romain Laurent has created sets of actions for each business team:

• The marketing team has been creating promo codes and special discounts as part of marketing campaigns. They also use Forest Admin as a CMS (Content Management System).
• Customer Support manages orders and refunds on Forest Admin, as well as assisting customers whenever they have issues. Forest Admin gives CS team members rapid access to customer data, so that they can quickly investigate the issue and perform necessary actions.
• The sales team needs access to data in order to have an idea of which shops have the biggest number of orders, so that they know where to focus their efforts.

Dashboards to track various KPIs

Apart from actions, Ma Ville Mon Shopping extensively uses the analytical features of Forest Admin - from the global dashboards to track KPIs to detailed charts to keep track of shops and their performance, specific products, and even comparing different geographical regions. This data is invaluable for each team, including the executive team, as it gives them both the big picture and detailed insight into the product and its customers.

A no-code-built customer and product finders

Ma Ville Mon Shopping has also created numerous Workspaces to browse through relevant data and take actions upon them. One of them is a Customer Finder, where after typing the name of the customer, all the relevant data and action buttons are displayed on one screen, making it possible, for example, for the customer support team to trigger a reimbursement. Another one is a Product Finder that allows finding, displaying, and editing different products presented in the gallery view, giving team members a similar experience of what they can see on the website that is in the back office. They can search for products, visualize them, access detailed information, and make edits, such as changing the product category or giving it a tag.

Summary

Forest Admin has made a significant impact on MVMS' internal operations, empowering non-dev teams with the tools and insights needed to support rapid growth and enhance customer service.

Thanks to Forest Admin, not only our developers saved a lot of time but also the business teams have got all the tools they need to support our customers and promote Ma Ville Mon Shopping externally. We’d also like to thank the Customer Success team of Forest Admin that has always been there whenever we needed assistance with adjusting Forest Admin to meet our unique needs. - said Romain Laurent.

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