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Project Overview

quicksales.com.au is dedicated to providing Australians with a safer, more convenient way to browse, buy or sell virtually anything online at any time. Unlike other overseas sites, quicksales.com.au is truly local and 100% free to sell.

With this in mind, the quicksales.com.au team committed to taking our best-in-market product mobile, with the fully-native iOS application, optimised for iPhone and iPad, the cornerstone of this strategy.

The quicksales.com.au iOS app is testament to what a small team can do when they are committed to providing Australians with a high-quality, local alternative to browse, buy and sell online.

Organisation

carsales.com.au

Team

Chen Zhou, iOS Developer
Thanh Pham, API Developer
Christine McKervey, User Interface Designer
Stuart Fazakerley, Quality Assurance Engineer

Project Brief

Coming fresh off a successful brand relaunch and experiencing a surge of interest in our product offering, the team at quicksales.com.au built our native iOS application from the ground up.

While this was our team's first foray into mobile, we did not use that fact as an excuse to deliver a sub-par user experience. Despite limited resources, the project fulfilled an ambitious scope, encompassing elements of browsing, buying and selling items that had not been implemented outside of the desktop before.

We developed an all-new API to deliver the necessary functionality to the application, and through the use of simple, elegant design and an all-native interface, we were able to deliver a product that was feature-rich, reliable, and importantly, easy to use. On release, the application was widely acclaimed, as shown by consistently high ranking and the growing user base, from 0 to over 60,000 users in under a year.

Project Need

This was the first mobile-oriented project for the quicksales.com.au team. While it had the potential to open up our product to a whole new audience, it required a complete re-imagining of how we deliver our services to users. What is special about this is that it has allowed us to take learnings from our application and introduce them to our users on other platforms.

The iOS application was the first quicksales.com.au product to use APIs, for browsing, buying and selling items. Originally, these APIs were engineered specifically for the application, but the success we have seen as a result of this innovation has led to APIs being more widely implemented on our desktop and mobile sites.

With growth in tablet usage, our application was built to be universal, optimised for both iPad and iPhone. The iPad application has a focus on high-resolution imagery, with features such as gallery view on search results, and full-screen galleries for items, giving users of the application a premium, immersive experience.

Snap 'n' Sell allows sellers to create, edit and manage their items from their mobile device. Using iPhone or iPad cameras, sellers can take photos of their item, fill in their details and get their ad online within minutes.

User Experience

Simplicity was key in designing the user experience. We were bringing our new product to an established platform and, as a result, provided users with a simple, standards-driven interface to encourage uptake and limit barriers to entry.

Whilst actively seeking new users on iOS, we rewarded the loyalty of our existing desktop user base through a deep integration of our membership program. Members could log in to the app for the first time and see all of their items, searches and transactions waiting for them. Conversely, they could start a purchase on mobile and finish it on the desktop, if they so chose.

On iPad, the focus on high-resolution imagery, with features such as gallery view on search results, and full-screen galleries for items, gives users of the application a premium, immersive experience.

Features such as a comprehensive location search underlines the importance of local to our users, and our overall product strategy.

Project Marketing

The quicksales.com.au iOS application has been consistently supported with on site digital creative, on both our desktop and mobile platforms, as well as a consistent SEO/SEM campaign. The application featured on our first two branded television campaigns, which coincided with significant spikes in downloads.