Turning Video Into a Scalable Shopping Experience for a Large European Fashion e-Commerce Platform

The Client: A large European fashion e-commerce platform

The client is a large European fashion e-commerce platform operating across multiple markets. Within its mobile shopping experience, video was evolving into a reusable customer experience across multiple product surfaces, requiring consistent technical foundations, compliance readiness, and reliable performance measurement.

‍

The Mission: Content and video product management

Product People supported a cross-functional video product team to establish a reusable video platform capability and activate customer value on top of it. The mission spanned platform enablement, experimentation, and feature delivery across video discovery, shopping, and retention use cases, while coordinating across Product, Design, Engineering, Analytics, Experimentation, Content, and dependent platform teams. Without addressing fragmentation, video would have remained slow to iterate, difficult to scale across product surfaces, and increasingly risky from a consistency and compliance perspective.

💫 Core concept: The reusable video platform centered on two core components—a video player and a discovery feed—designed for adoption across product surfaces via shared mobile entry points.

‍

Our Main Quest: Scale a reusable video platform

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

The engagement began with rapid alignment on ways of working, governance, and ownership across the video product team. Clear rituals, sign-off checkpoints, and escalation paths were documented early, ****including shared weekly planning and reporting with the core working group and a shared roadmap view used to align delivery across Product, Design, and Engineering. Key processes and dependencies across teams were also mapped, alongside structured handover documentation to support continuity as the mission scaled.

Explore and Conquer: From fragmented stacks to reusable platform capabilities

The work focused on addressing long-standing fragmentation in video implementations and reducing duplicated effort across product surfaces by enabling video to operate as a centrally owned, reusable platform capability rather than surface-specific features. Previously, each product surface relied on its own legacy video player that was hard to evolve, supported by ad-hoc processes that made accessibility compliance and performance tracking inconsistent. With the platform in place, video could be delivered via a shared tech stack with clear ownership, enabling standardised accessibility and performance expectations and making changes easier to roll out across product surfaces.

‍

Initiatives

Initiative 1 – Reusable video platform enablement

Problem: Video had historically been implemented through multiple players and feeds built on different technical stacks, resulting in duplicated engineering effort, inconsistent UX, and limited reuse across product surfaces. This fragmentation slowed feature delivery and experimentation, and made it difficult to standardise observability, accessibility, and DSA-related requirements.

What we did:

• Defined and delivered a reusable video platform capability with the video product team, consolidating fragmented video implementations into a single framework to eliminate duplicated effort, speed up delivery of new video use cases and enable consistent experiences across product surfaces.
• Supported multiple entry points such as carousel, feed, and in-line video experiences, and clarified adoption requirements for shared mobile implementation.
• Advanced WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility readiness for video experience, ensuring alignment with international regulatory requirements and compliance.
• Defined a performance monitoring dashboard, identifying key success metrics for the video discovery feed and modelling them against industry standards, making it easier for teams to consistently monitor performance, detect issues early and make informed trade-off decisions.

Initiative 2 – Strengthened retention by enabling shopping, sharing, and saving

Problem: While the video platform foundation was in place, video needed to drive stronger weekly active users (WAU) and high-value engagement (HVE) users to meaningfully contribute to retention. Achieving this required activating clear value loops for shopping, sharing, and re-engagement within video, while navigating technical and organisational dependencies.

What we did:

• Activated in-video shopping within the video experience and rolled it out through controlled experimentation and phased release, reducing friction between inspiration and action and increasing opportunities for high-value engagement. Key engagement metrics such as CTA interaction and time spent improved by over 10%, while video discovery feed bounce rate dropped below typical benchmarks for comparable discovery surfaces, enabling video to contribute meaningfully to downstream conversion and GMV.
• Progressed sharing capabilities into engineering execution and experimentation setup, introducing repeat exposure and re-entry loops to support growth in weekly active usage.
• Advanced video saving capabilities through PRD and design phases to support re-engagement by allowing users to revisit relevant video content, laying the foundation for increased return visits across product surfaces.

‍

Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

• Content understanding and ingestion: Established a shared understanding of how different video content types, supported by multiple tools, flow from source systems into the video discovery feed. By creating a single, end-to-end view, teams were able to reduce duplicated effort, minimise confusion, and make more aligned planning and prioritisation decisions across product surfaces.
• Established video ways of working: Defined clear ways of working, roadmap alignment, and cross-functional preparation to support predictable delivery and readiness for future video feature releases across product surfaces.
• Experimentation Idea Backlog: Built a structured pipeline of experiment ideas to test, validate, and iteratively improve video features, creating a test-and-learn backlog that supported experimentation planning for at least two quarters and gave teams a clear, prioritised runway for improving the video experience.
• Context-aware stream intake: Defined and progressed an intake proposal for more context-aware video streams, enabling future personalisation and more relevant video experiences based on user context and behaviour.
• Roadmap and feature backlog: Created and maintained a shared roadmap view and feature backlog to align priorities across teams, support transparent decision-making, and prepare the video platform for future iterations and launches.

‍

Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

Enabled scalable video as a reusable building block by delivering the video carousel experience and in-line video player and successfully progressing them through experimentation and rollout, allowing video to be adopted consistently across product surfaces.

Released in-video shopping and expanded rollout to the 95% of users in Q4, turning video inspiration into tangible shopping actions and engagement.

Completed accessibility validation against WCAG 2.2 Level AA and aligned with industry accessibility standards in Q3, ensuring video experiences met compliance requirements and supported inclusive access at scale.

Established performance benchmarks for video experiences in Q4 by defining success metrics and aligning them with industry standards, enabling consistent monitoring and informed decision-making.

Strengthened cross-functional alignment between technical teams, resulting in more efficient implementation and fewer communication bottlenecks.