Feature · Product design
City Hive Bulk upload .CSV order creation
Upload a spreadsheet, create an order. The design problem was everything that goes wrong in between.
Research → UX → UI → Handoff
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TL;DR
"There should be an API end point that allows authenticated users to send an excel listing of products and to have cart created and ready for them.
Apparently a common use case for bars and restaurants." - and so a journey began.
Company — City Hive, a beverage e-commerce platform
Role — Product Designer (end-to-end: research, UX, UI, spec)
Surfaces — Merchant dashboard, storefront
Year — 2025
Shipped — Yes, merchant dashboard first
HOW I READ IT
Where we start
The request assumed a clean file. In beverage retail it almost never is.
A bar manager exports an order from their own inventory system and sends it over. Some barcodes are stale, some belong to a different distributor, some rows have no quantity at all. A few products match several sizes — 50ml, 200ml, a 12-pack — and the file doesn't say which. A few are out of stock today.
An endpoint handles this by returning an error array. That leaves someone with a 167-line order and no idea which lines failed or what to do about them.
So I treated the upload as the easy half. The design problem was what happens to the rows that don't match — and whether someone can finish their order anyway.
