This week was all about how a website actually gets built to sell something, and it changed how I'm thinking about chooseamovie.app.
I started the week off comparing Letterboxd and Reelgood since they are both my competitors in the space. Looking at them side by side made the design choices obvious. Letterboxd keeps everything visual and clean, and that's the direction I want for my homepage, especially since people have to pay before they get into the service. If the first thing they see doesn't look worth it, they're gone.
The ecommerce side was where I learned the most. I always assumed taking payments was as easy as adding a button. It isn't. You need a cart platform like Shopify connected to a payment gateway like Stripe. Sales tax surprised me too, since every state sets its own rate and the platform has to figure it out at checkout based on where the customer is.
Our class talked a lot about shipping, inventory, and returns. Not much of that applies to a digital service like mine, but it made me think harder about what my version of checkout really needs to do. My takeaway is that design and payments are the same problem. A site has to look worth paying for and make paying easy, or it loses people at the moment they were about to pay. Definitely a good marketing principle to have.