The Pakistani “E-Commerce” User Experience

Why technology becomes a bottleneck for Daraz and Cheetay to achieve great UX? Exploring where the gap is, how product backlog and systems thinking is the solution and what is the community’s role.

The piece is originally from my Substack newsletter: Takhleeq. I wanted to share this on Medium for readers who have engaged with my articles on design and tech in the past. If you enjoy what I write do hit subscribe!

Shopping online in Pakistan is an interesting experience to say the least. Often I scroll through social media to find angsty consumers rant about how they received a broken piece of electronic or a wrong piece of clothing. Not so long ago, a young vlogger did an unboxing video of a drone that he ordered from Daraz only that the box was empty. The video became a meme and Daraz frantically had to undo the “fraud” through an orchestrated display of customer care.

There is a shadow of doubt cast over mainstream e-commerce services that include the likes of Daraz, Cheetay and Foodpanda. Even if online business volumes have gone up by 78.9% as a result of COVID-19 according to a recent SBP report, encouraging Pakistani users to embrace online shopping remains a hard problem to solve with…