Designing Mobile e-Commerce for the Less Tech-Savvy Indonesians
If you open Sale Stock website https://www.salestockindonesia.com/ you will find picture cards on a one column content page with infinite scroll. Would you believe if I told you that this Instagram-feed-like website is an e-commerce?
It might be puzzling to have a very minimalist website and “wasting” a lot of white space on the sides of the content column. The “common e-commerce” we know, is supposed to be all about product discoverability: how to lay out as many products as possible on a flat computer screen with categories and sub-categories inside mega-menus, lots of banners with CTA, flashy promos, shopping floors, et cetera
However, Sale Stock is not following that trend.
Sale Stock is a mobile-first e-commerce website that sells fashion items. Sale Stock’s vision is to give access to quality and affordable clothes to the next billion people. We have been around since June 2014.
The Start
Sale Stock started as a home-based online shop. Early in the days, the founders sold clothes on Facebook. When it started growing, Sale Stock released its first own website, using Sirclo platform. During this website version, you’ll find Sale Stock looking like other e-commerce sites: with products spread all across the wide landscape home page, categories on the header, carousel banners, etc.
Keeping Focus
Starting a whole new website, Sale Stock also started keeping track on its traffic. After a while, it turned out that the majority of the traffic came from mobile devices. Seeing this trend, Sale Stock then took a bold strategic move to only focus its service on users using mobile devices. At the same time Sale Stock had started the initiative to move to its own independent platform.
Migrating its whole inventory and system from Sirclo, Sale Stock started a new strategy. Since the main traffic is from mobile devices, Sale Stock prioritized its design for mobile users. Keeping a website both for desktop and mobile would take a lot of efforts in both design and code. This is why Sale Stock’s website “wastes” a lot of white space on the side when viewed in desktop: it is maintaining the same codebase for web view and mobile view. This approach proved to save a lot of time and allows Sale Stock to focus on growth.
Was it a smooth change? Well, right after migration from Sirclo, a lot of existing customers disliked the new mobile-first layout. They hated that they have to scroll a lot in the new website and felt that the previous layout was much better. But after a while it wasn’t that much of a problem, and sales still went pretty well.
Indonesian Market
Who are “the next-billion people”? Sale Stock demographic description would be 18–35, female, lives anywhere within the Indonesian archipelago, who wishes for more affordable clothing while still can stay in style. Interestingly a high proportion of Sistas — what Sale Stock calls its customer — had their first digital interaction through mobile phones. They don’t have computer or laptop at home, but they do an Android phone. Some may previously used Blackberry.
A surprising fact — found when our team talked to Sistas at an event in Jambi — is that some Sistas even do not understand what a password is, most likely they do not understand the concept of an account. There are actually some of possibilities behind this, one is that they are much used to using chat applications compared to other social networking sites, and two, when they bought the mobile phone, somebody else set up their social media account.
This is how challenging our market is. In Indonesia, especially in Java island, we can find a population who understands very well how information technology, gadget, social media, and e-commerce work. But in other parts of Indonesia it is not impossible to find a completely different story. We’ve embraced the fact that our customers think that Sale Stock is a social-media-based online shop owned by Soraya.
Thus the biggest challenges in creating and maintaining design for Sale Stock is: creating a product design that are easy to use and understand while keeping the design ultra lightweight.
Design+Data
The user interface in Sale Stock doesn’t work by itself to create a good user experience. Sale Stock highly uses data and artificial intelligence for a whole range of things, including product feed. Sale Stock’s product feed is algorithmic, i.e pictures cards are not the same between one person and another. Data are used to give a personalised product recommendation to the user, since we can’t show all items to user, we want to show the right items for them. Personalisation is our main gear for product discovery.
On the other way around, design research is used to help create AI-based systems. Sale Stock is moving towards automation using artificial intelligence, both for customer-facing and internal systems. Design and user experience research is used to make sure that the automation does not lose it’s context.
Every business have their own goals and challenges and their design should also support to reach this goal. Sale Stock’s customer is very specific, with distinctive characteristics and needs, and this is why Sale Stock’s design is different to other e-commerce sites. We are constantly improving design in Sale Stock, moving in line with our to-be released features. Like in any strategic decision, every design decision must be supported by data, because — quoting Steve Jobs — design is not only about how something looks; it’s about how it works.
Interested to join? Our design team is looking for UX Researchers, UX Designers, UX Developers, and UI/Visual Designers. Send us your CV and design portfolio through Sale Stock Engineering career page.
Many thanks to Vina Zerlina, Rayi Christian W for helping me with this article
