The Approach
There are many considerations when building a website with a global audience, especially where e-commerce is concerned.
Backend and technical development
On the technical front, careful thought around visitors’ location and currency had to be considered. The ability for the website to scale and deal with growing global traffic was also vital to its success.
Enabling anyone around the world to set up an account from which they can easily buy and sell through the site and how that’s administered required attention.
Being able to organise the site’s extensive content and link it in a controlled way with the e-commerce product listings was also vitally important to optimise and maximise the marketing opportunities for the website.
XD and UI design
Where all technical considerations had been defined, being able to deliver a great user experience through well thought out user interaction design was key.
With the added complexities of multiple seller accounts and administration of product listings, alongside the variety of non-e-commerce content to consider the layouts for, it was crucial that a consistent and intuitive user experience was created.
This was achieved using a design system for the website, both on the frontend and the backend administration. Due to the expansive use of product icons throughout the site, we created a special web icon font. This helped improve performance over the use of hundreds of individual icon files.