☆ CraftNation.com – Start-up Case Study – Ecommerce

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Fig 1. Craftnation.com logo design

Role: Founder/UX Architect
Industry: Handmade Designer Goods Retail
Country: UK
Case: Custom Built CMS and Time-lined Deals
Challenge: Third-party integration, configurable product ordering, user generated content, bespoke CMS
Founders: Louise Campbell (UXD), Alice Still (Developer)

CraftNation.com was a proof of concept on-line retailer, described as “Hot or Not for handmade goods”. Launched in 2009 to give designers a platform to showcase their prototypes. Customers could vote-up their favourites, favourites with the most votes were deployed to time-lined deals – customers would pay upfront to place a pre-order on their favourite designs.

★ Results

  • Over 1,000 products listed in the 1st 3 months
  • Over 300 designers
  • Easy product upload
  • Easy to configure listings
  • Successfully customised Paypal integration
  • Federated search and filtering
  • Bespoke admin panel for administrators
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Fig 1. Craftnation.com homepage
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Fig 2. Craftnation.com – Vote page
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Fig 2. Craftnation.com – Time-lined deals pages
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Fig 3. Craftnation.com – Daily Newsletter Deal

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Fig 2. Craftnation.com website badges for sellers


Fig 3. Craftnation Youtube Channel – Designer Interviews: The Isamo Crochet interview had over 140,000 views 

★ Challenge

The rationale behind CraftNation.com was designer makers would only make what customers had pre-ordered, allowing designers to predict demand and get payment upfront for orders, reducing time and money spent on stock that never sells. The website was originally built in 2009, by developer PHP developer Alice Still. I designed the Web content management system and UI which was based on the LAMP framework.From the outset, the software was easy to customise as we had complete control over the CMS. It performed well in terms of flexibility, speed and customisation costs. There were some early teething problems however including: the designers experiencing difficulty updating and managing content such as uploading images, images rendering in the browser, re-listing products, and adding location data to the Craftnation map. These problems where easy and fast to fix as we did not have to customise a 3rd party CMS.

★ Content Strategy

  • Align with business goals
  • Define task flow by substance, structure and work-flow
  • Define ongoing time commitment, technical resources, hardware and team commitment
  • Example: the editorial strategy (“product development for content”) might include an editorial calendar, editorial work-flows and a style guide.