Bringing e-commerce to Europe's largest convenience chain

All Żabka knew was they needed to get into e-commerce fast

Żabka is Poland's largest convenience store chain, with 12,500 stores and 10,000 franchisees operating on a model built around speed and proximity. They needed to get into e-commerce fast, but did not know what form it should take: fold it into their existing loyalty app, launch something new, or partner with a delivery platform. Ueno was brought in to navigate that ambiguity.

In Poland, the average person is never more than 400 meters from a Żabka

Category, customer, and company

Research ran in three tracks simultaneously. Category research mapped the global on-demand convenience landscape and where Żabka had a genuine right to win. Company research ran stakeholder interviews across Corporate, Product, Operations, Commerce, and Customer Care. Customer research brought us into the field with real Żabka shoppers.

We put paper prototypes in people's hands to understand how they thought about convenience, delivery, and the Żabka brand. Some ideas that tested well, like group shopping, opened up entirely new design and operational questions. Those edge cases became design challenges in their own right.

Testing paper prototypes with real Żabka shoppers

The real complexity was operational

Building a delightful e-commerce app is hard. Building one that works at Żabka's scale, with franchisee-run stores, variable inventory, and a 15-minute delivery promise, required solving problems with no obvious answers.

Mapping what happens behind the screen

Much of the real design work happened at the service level, not the UI level. We mapped the full e-commerce experience across delivery and click and collect, tracking customer actions, store actions, pain points, and opportunities at every touchpoint. The experience map made operational complexity legible and gave the product and engineering teams a shared model to reason from.

E-commerce experience map

Making 12,500 stores feel like one

With a catalog spanning thousands of SKUs across stores with different inventory, one of the core challenges was ensuring products were named, grouped, and surfaced consistently regardless of store or context. We defined taxonomy rules that accounted for time of day, season, and user behavior, so that the right products appeared at the right moment.

We worked closely with the Żabka team to make sure recommendations would resonate with the Polish market, from naming conventions and editorial voice to how promotions and bundles were framed. Bundles were curated sets of products designed to editorialize the catalog, surface underused items, and increase basket size while feeling genuinely useful rather than promotional.

Category taxonomy with room to grow

Curated product groupings

A dedicated sprint to codify the system

After the core design work was complete, we ran a separate monthlong sprint to streamline and codify the design system. The system was built on three foundations: experience principles that defined how Żabka Jush should feel, an atomic design approach that made the component library scalable, and a content, language, and UX/UI framework that kept the experience consistent without needing to spec every use case.

Żabka Jush