Introduction

Cdiscount is one of France’s largest e-commerce platforms, serving a highly international seller base with a significant proportion of users in Asia. As the marketplace scaled, a widening gap emerged between European-centric design assumptions and how non-European sellers actually used the product.

This case study explores how UX research and design can scale across cultures within a global e-commerce platform. Through generative research, I uncovered how language, cultural context, and reliance on third-party translation tools fundamentally shaped the way Asian sellers interpreted the interface, navigated workflows, and made decisions. Rather than advocating for full localisation, which sat outside the project’s business and technical constraints, I reframed the challenge as designing for translated experiences: optimising the product for users who interact with it through a translation layer rather than in its native language. This shift unlocked pragmatic, scalable UX strategies that improved usability without fragmenting the product.

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