Proto-personas for marketplace software buyers, drafted from evidence cards

Marketplace seller software buyer personas should be short evidence cards, not invented characters. A card summarises a tested decision role, recent task, constraints and variation in a defined England seller sample. It must never add a fictional name, portrait, age, disability, turnover, budget or motive.

Until fieldwork exists, label every card "hypothetical proto-persona". Its purpose is to expose recruitment and evidence gaps, not to describe the market.

Start with the seller decision

Use one question across the set: should an England merchant retain its current process or investigate another way to keep an authorised product record, stock position and later order states consistent with one marketplace account?

The legal seller, marketplace operator and software supplier remain distinct. A buyer can approve procurement, while catalogue, order, customer-service, safety, finance, privacy, security or accessibility specialists may veto or shape it. Consumers experience the listing and transaction but do not become software buyers because they completed an order.

GOV.UK's online-selling guide provides current context for seller information and ordering. It does not establish who performs a merchant's internal work. Recruit and verify that evidence directly.

Use one evidence-card schema

Create a blank card with these fields:

Field	What can be entered
Population	Defined role in the sampled organisation
Evidence base	Sample, field dates, instrument version and source records
Recent job	One observed or corroborated marketplace task
Decision authority	Documented approve, recommend, perform or review status
Friction	Traceable event, participant statement or unknown
Constraints	Account terms, safety, privacy, access, accessibility, finance or time evidence
Variation	Contrary cases and conditions where the pattern changes
Confidence	Researcher's reasoned level, with missing evidence
Expiry	Event or date that forces a recheck

Keep observed behaviour, respondent language and editorial interpretation in separate fields. Do not polish a participant's comment into an invented quotation.

Draft hypotheses without pretending they are findings

A catalogue-control card might hypothesise that a person approving listing changes needs better version traceability. An order-reconciliation card might hypothesise that someone joining refunds to settlement records needs clearer state mapping. A procurement card might focus on contract, export and continuity evidence. These are task hypotheses only. They say nothing about prevalence, willingness to pay or the person's demographic characteristics.

HMRC's digital-platform seller page can clarify the narrow reporting meaning of seller and entity. Companies House register-search guidance can verify limited company facts. Neither proves the participant's marketplace role, England operating location or buying power.

Protect people represented by a card

Avoid attributes that are unnecessary to the decision. The ICO's research safeguards guidance stresses minimisation and considering anonymous information. It is under review following DUAA changes, so a privacy adviser must recheck it. Pseudonyms do not make personal data anonymous.

Accessibility belongs in the research design. GOV.UK guidance on running sessions with disabled people advises asking about and supporting the participant's own needs. Do not convert an adjustment into a persona stereotype or infer diagnosis from assistive technology.

Promote, revise or retire

After fieldwork, attach each card to its sample and analysis ledger. Promote it only when several traceable cases support the same bounded task and contrary evidence is shown. Revise it when the marketplace workflow or role changes. Retire it if the source sample expires, evidence cannot be reconstructed or the card encourages staff to make decisions about individuals.

A useful proto-persona makes uncertainty obvious. If readers cannot tell what was observed, who was sampled and what remains unknown, keep the card out of the buyer decision.