China started to turn to Western ways of life in the 80s, at the same time instant coffee product starts to get popular among Chinese consumers. The westernization in China accelerated after 2000. The year to year growth rate of coffee consuming in China is around 25%, while the global growth rate is only at 2% to 3%.

Nowadays, Italian coffee is the most popular options among young consumers in China. Chain stores such like Starbuck has built a strong brand image. However, there are some customers start to question the tastes of the chain store coffee. This group of the customers begins to turn to specialty coffee. We believe the consumption upgrade in the Chinese market will drive more sale of high-end coffee products. With that in mind, our project “Pindous Coffee” started.

In China, online shopping highly relies on the mobile platform. For example, Alibaba reached $17.8 billion worth of gross merchandise volume during the “Single’s day”. 83.72% of the trades came from the mobile platform.

Wechat is the must-have social network in China with the number of daily users of 800 million. Wechat has a well-established ecosystem, which including advertising service, compatible third-party marketplace, and payment platform.

The previous version of the MicroStrategy application has a counter-intuitive IA model. It was designed based on a development priority rather than a user-centric perspective.

The first mobile website we launched is quite complicated. As you can see, the home page features four different sections: Introduction of our brand, explanation of our business and service, product description, and the link to purchase coffee. User can tap on the button (such as learn more) to navigate to another webpage and see more detail.

We decided to launch an extremely lightweight desktop site to test the water. The desktop was acting purely as a traffic driver, which brings users to our mobile site via a Wechat QR code.

The initially launched website did not perform very well, and based on the metric, we can see high users drop on the product detail page. Here is some feedback we got from user interviews:

• Most of our mobile site traffic came from Wechat. Most of the users in this group had already followed our channel for a while and were quite familiar with our service and products. They accessed to our mobile website only to purchase coffee.
• Users who accessed the desktop site had an opposite expectation. A lot of them had never heard of us before; they would like to see more information on the site before proceeding to purchase.

Shortly after the initial launch, we altered the design on both desktop and mobile based on user feedback.

Wechat was our primary traffic driver.
We created several Wechat chat rooms for Coffee enthusiasts. In addition to that, we also produced a content-rich channel.

Desktop website acted as our secondary traffic driver. Additionally, it also hosted the introduction to our brand and service. We expected the site to help to build trust between new customer and us.

In contrary to the desktop site, we decided to simplify the mobile site. In the new design, users can view the coffee selection directly on the home page, and they can navigate to our store with one tap.

Our online store was built on Youzan.com. Youzan handles all the purchase and payment related features. The downside of using Youzan’s solution was the very restricted store design. Below are two screenshots of our store using Youzan’s template.

Pindous Coffee is a project of passion. The first quarter was tough, but we got through it, and after six months, we reached the break-even point. We ran the business for almost a year until we shut it down due to financial reasons. It was a great learning experience for me.