StackShops
WEB DESIGN
Refreshing Design for an
E-commerce Template
StackShops is the core product of StackCommerce, a company that helps online publishers drive revenue through a proprietary inventory of products sold through content. At the time that StackShops was first built, it was only designed to house products relevant to a tech audience. However, over the years, Stack grew to work with over 200 publishers and 2,000 merchants across a much larger variety of audiences and product categories.
The Problem(s)
It nearly goes without saying: the existing template no longer served the growing needs of the business. Nearly all parties involved (publishers, merchants, customers, and even our internal team) experienced a slew of pain points, including:
Lack of options to customize the look & feel of a Shop to match a publisher’s branding.
Lack of options to customize presentation or display of products to align with a publisher’s brand or marketing campaigns.
Overall design of the Shop was a little outdated and lacking basic trends in e-commerce design.
Navigation was too basic for growing complexity of product variety (new products added daily).
Project Goals
With such a small team, it was important for us to set goals that would enable business growth with low internal overhead. To address the largest pain points we identified, we set the following top two goals:
Add customization features that balance partner needs with internal overhead.
Enable better product discovery and curation.
Solving for Scale with Modules
Since such a large part of this project's goal was around being able to "define" a Shop for a publisher, our main focus was on the homepage.
We refreshed the design by adding some new module options that could be configured in almost any layout, allowing our internal team to work with both publishers and vendors to help curate and spotlight the right products and look & feel of the Shop.
Trending Now Module
Showcases best-selling products in real time, with new UI around urgency messaging.
Marketing Callout
Full-bleed strip to promote anything outside of a product (such as a loyalty program).
Collections Module
Way-finding module to surface curated collections on the site.
Commerce Content
A module to integrate a publisher's existing commerce content into their Shop, which utilizes already-existing content.
A New Mega Menu
We introduced the mega menu into StackShops to help surface more top- and sub-level categories of collections and products in an organized fashion.
Results
In the end, the new design touches we added to StackShops not only made it possible to easily customize the look and feel of a Shop, but they also helped close one of StackCommerce's biggest partners to date—CNN. A super successful outcome—in particular given that one of the driving motivators in doing this refresh was to keep growing the business.
Team
I worked with the Director of Product Design and CEO of StackCommerce on this project.
My Role
Lead Visual/UI Design