My experience working on a Tech e-commerce team
As a software engineer, with more than 12 years of experience, I have worked in different areas during my career (social networks, Saas, HR solutions, eCommerce, etc). All projects had big challenges that I faced.
But today I would like to post about one of these areas, eCommerce. I started working on Domestika (a creative community with professional courses) in January 2021, and I could say that it is the biggest project where I have worked.
The Domestika courses can be purchased by the users, which means that a big part of the platform is eCommerce. It was my first time working on an eCommerce project.
After 3 years of working here, I have learned a lot. I have developed products in our platform related to purchases, order management, refunds, subscriptions, pricing, etc. And I have had the opportunity to lead one of the squads in the eCommerce department, the Discovery team.
What does Discovery mean for Domestika? In the eCommerce section of the platform, we have a funnel where users are interacting. This funnel has some stages, and Discovery is the second stage:
- Growth: is responsible for growing Domestika’s customer base. It includes these features: sign up, log in, user profile, or landing pages.
- Discovery: is responsible for helping users find the content they are looking for, and understanding the user preferences. It includes searches, recommendations, course directories, or other product pages (like subscriptions, course packs, gift cards…).
- Purchase: is responsible for maximizing conversion rate and average order value. The areas are the course landing page, checkout, cart, and pricing.
- Payments: this stage is responsible for the payment process. It includes payment processor integration, payment methods, or fraud.
So, the user moves to these stages from being registered in the platform to completing a purchase.
Of course, there are other crossing-functionalities presented in some or all stages. Let me share one of them, tracking. The tracking is being integrated into every part of the platform, thanks to that, we can follow how users are interacting with the web and the apps. The info provided by this tracking allows other teams like Data or Product, to analyze it and make decisions based on the results.
For example, we could track if a user is purchasing a course by navigating from the course landing or a marketing banner. So, depending on this behavior we could decide to show this banner in other places or remove it.
You can imagine how many possibilities can be made in the user interaction. As engineers, we have the challenge of converting the product criteria into pieces of code to show interfaces and processes that users must understand to finally achieve a good conversion.
But it is not enough, other challenges are related to stability and congruence. On the one hand, we must have a strong and secure system for payments. We are handling money, and the users want not to waste or lose their money, and the company wants not to decrease the revenue. On the other hand, we need to create congruence information in the user screen. If a product has an offer, the price displayed should be consistent with the real amount and offer amount, or if the user applies a discount code, the prices must be properly shown, or if the user comes from another country, the proper currencies must be applied…
In summary, there are a lot of functionalities with complex logic in an eCommerce platform, so as engineers we are in charge of creating a product with a good purchase experience for our users.
