field notes · 2023 · 3 min

Setting up a store nobody would ever check out from

a class project on the parts of e-commerce nobody talks about.

MThe Mech Keyboards was never going to sell a single keyboard. It was a class project for a Laurier e-commerce course, built on Square Online, with the explicit understanding that no real customer would ever hit checkout. Which, it turns out, is exactly the kind of low-stakes setting where you actually pay attention to the boring parts.

Product listings, categories, pricing, checkout flow — the stuff every real store has and almost nobody thinks about until it's wrong. Where does a split keyboard go if it's also a wireless keyboard? Does 'switches' get its own category or live under accessories? These are not hard questions, but they're the questions that decide whether a shopper finds what they want in ten seconds or gives up.↑ switches ended up under accessories. I still think about this.

A storefront is mostly invisible decisions. You only notice them by making a few badly first.

Square Online made the mechanics easy, which was almost the point: with the platform out of the way, the actual coursework was information architecture wearing a storefront's clothes. Category structure, pricing display, checkout friction, all the stuff that's invisible when it's done right and the entire experience when it's done wrong.

It's a class project with no live transactions and I'm not pretending otherwise. But it's also the reason I notice, now, when a real store's category structure makes no sense, because I once spent an afternoon deciding where switches go.clack clack, no refunds necessary