How I became a part of AliExpress localization

#programming #typescript #react

Preamble

Those were deep covid times when I've joined the Seller Center frontend team of AliExpress Russia. At that moment AliExpress has been operating there for 10 years. Five years ago the first office was opened in Moscow and there was a small team of engineers who supported local features.

Localization beginning

Large Chinese companies usually prefer to capture new markets by buying out local projects and building their business around them. In Russia everything went differently - Alibaba began to develop a marketplace together with local partners. And this is the first case in the history of the company.

In the autumn of 2019, an important event happened in the life of AliExpress Russia: Alibaba Group, Mail.ru Group, Megafon and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) launched a joint venture in the field of e-commerce. This has meant only one thing - the active development of new products, including their development from scratch and a serious adaptation of the services.

Why was it so important to have a localized version of AliExpress if there is an international one is available for users? As I was living in China for quite a long time I have dived headlong into their cultural characteristics and even got used to them. In China the most popular app for buying anything you need or don't need is Taobao. When I opened it for the first time I thought I literally had an intoxication by colors, flashes, stickers, banners, alerts, notifications, and so on.

Taobao app main page

What is it all for? This approach is quite popular in China because it encourages users to spend a lot of time in the application and buy more. Minimalistic approach, on the contrary, is not encouraged. As people, who are following more western culture rather than eastern, Russian people find this design seems too aggressive because they used to see concise, minimalistic interfaces and soothing colors.

Localization reasons

Approaches to product development and user preferences in Asia and Europe are different, and it is quite difficult for engineers to adapt to new requirements. As a result, the product is specific to local users and does not take into account all their needs.

AliExpress is the same Taobao but for the external market. Therefore, it was made in exactly the same way: using the same development tools and the same UI/UX. So users shouldn't expect AliExpress to meet the expectations of each country differently.

Previously, the development of AliExpress was mainly carried out by specialists from China. Firstly, some of the local features are difficult to make in China because they are characteristic only of specific country, for example, a good local search with nuances of the specific language. In addition, within the Alibaba Group, it was difficult for the local division to obtain resources for development: the holding's projects within China were given priority due to the much larger scale of the latter. If there was a choice - to make a new feature for AliExpress.ru or Taobao - then priority was given to the Chinese project, because a change in it would potentially bring much more money.

In the IT industry companies are often built on a closed technology stack (Google, Amazon), which can be very different from what is popular in the world today. So AliExpress wasn't an exception but in addition to this, there was documentation in Chinese language. On the one hand, the efforts of local Chinese engineers have undeniable advantages. However, the development of a product in foreign markets by foreign specialists is fraught with difficulties. Among the most obvious is that it takes a lot of time to figure out the code, and it is not easy to develop it with unfamiliar tools. This complicates the onboarding of new engineers, they take longer to “get involved” and it is harder for them to reach maximum productivity. For obvious reasons, there are no specialists who would have experience working with such technologies in Russia.

What has changed

AliExpress Russia has decided to eventually abandon the original technology stack in those areas where open source has analogs of comparable quality. In particular, all Alibaba Group websites are written in Java stack. But for local AliExpress Kotlin was chosen as a more compatible and modern language. Also were taken other technologies according to the principle of modernity and better compatibility: Kubernetes, GitLab, C#, etc. On the frontend part before there was a shared library with components to use for new features. As a result, we've created our library by using modern technologies such as TypeScript + React. At the same time, many Alibaba Group projects will remain, for example, MaxCompute (an enterprise-level cloud data warehouse that uses the software as a service (SaaS) mode). And for the users, the most important part is that previous interfaces were rewritten and new features were created and designed in a more familiar style.

These are examples of how the main app interfaces were changed:

Login page

Privilege center page

Localization steps

The tasks of AliExpress engineers in Russia were divided into three categories:

Creation of own infrastructure, not tied to proprietary Chinese solutions. This was necessary for faster development, compatibility with modern technologies and high reliability.
High-quality localization - search, improvement and adaptation of UX/UI to the habits of local users, new convenient tools for sellers from Russia.
Launching new products that will benefit customers right now. It was important not to “dig in” exclusively to solving global problems, but to be useful immediately.

The first completely local product was "Eat!". It's an app where you can shop for groceries and daily necessities. The entire development process before the launch has took only three months, including both technical work and the conclusion of contracts with partners. The microservice architecture was chosen for this project, the backend was written in C#, net core 3.1, the frontend was written in React and QA was using Python. The application infrastructure includes a Kubernetes cluster, Gitlab - CI/CD, Graylog, jaeger, grafana, apache kafka. This is a toolkit already familiar to developers. Postgres was used as the database.

"Eat!" app interface

Seller Center

My team and I were working on Seller Center - the platform for sellers to operate their businesses. I joined the company when teams were already actively rewriting existing features and creating new ones based on the chosen toolkit. Here are the changes for local sellers:

Old service level

New service level

Old product reviews

New product reviews

These examples are more about appearance, but new users will not be lured by design changes alone. Improvements are needed relating to new product ideas. Something, that not only international AliExpress doesn't have but also other local marketplaces. Something, that will set trends:
1) Products import by using Excel and YML.

Import by using Excel

Import by using YML

2) Store customization tools such as changing/updating store type, name, domain and logistic; creating/editing products online. Automation of the entire process so as not to overload sellers with unnecessary work with papers, signatures, and so on.

Store editing

Products editing

3) In logistics, a possibility to deliver by the seller's method: just need to upload a shipping template.

Seller's delivery method

Сonclusion

By localizing AliExpress, we've also made the symbiosis of Asian successful marketplace and local modern technologies. The ability to rebuild AliExpress gave us a lot of advantages to improve the quality of the product and increase the amount of users, to create new features which are not represented in the main AliExpress. This localization way has just begun and I wish AliExpress Russia good luck in conquering the hearts of users and sellers.