Achat et Vente

Context

Achat et Vente is a French classifieds marketplace where private individuals and professionals list vehicles, property, electronics, home and garden items, fashion, leisure equipment and services. It also runs a separate recruitment track for employers and jobseekers.

Challenge

A marketplace has a structural problem no brochure site has: the product is other people's content, and there is none of it until someone posts. Every screen has to serve two opposite intentions at once — browsing and listing — without the interface becoming a compromise that serves neither. Add member accounts, search, ten top-level categories and a jobs section, and the risk is a homepage that is a directory of features rather than a way in.

Strategy

We put search at the top, categories immediately beneath it, and the listing action in permanent reach at every level of the site. A visitor who knows what they want types it; a visitor who is browsing scrolls into the categories; a visitor who came to sell never has to look for the button.

Recruitment was given its own entry pair — hiring and looking for work — rather than being flattened into the general category grid, because a job search behaves nothing like a search for a second-hand sofa.

Design and system

Category tiles carry weight in the composition because they are the real navigation. Featured and latest listings sit below them to demonstrate that the marketplace is populated, which is the thing a new visitor is unconsciously checking. Popular searches close the sequence as a low-commitment way back into the catalogue.

Build

The platform supports member accounts with registration and sign-in, free listing submission, category browsing and search, alongside the recruitment section. The mobile layout reduces to a persistent bar carrying home, search and post — the three actions that account for most sessions — rather than reproducing the desktop navigation at a smaller size.

Outcome

Built a marketplace architecture supporting free listings, member accounts, category browsing and a separate recruitment track, with posting reachable from every level of the site.