General Buyback Site — A Screen Design That Carries One Photo Through to an Inquiry

General Buyback Site — Before "I suppose I just throw it away"

A website proposal for a buyback shop that accepts a wide range of items. The request was for a desktop site, but the customers are in their twenties to forties, and people of that age look things up almost entirely on a phone. We therefore proposed a design covering both desktop and mobile at the same price.

The design we proposed

1. Three ways in, always at the foot of the screen

Telephone, LINE, and photo appraisal stay at the bottom of the screen at all times. Outside opening hours the display switches and guides the visitor to photo appraisal instead. The phone number is set as text, not as an image; a number inside an image cannot be tapped to call.

2. "Will they even buy this?" answered on the spot

Items can be looked up by name, so fewer visitors leave without knowing. We also say plainly that not knowing the name of the item is perfectly fine.

3. Building a record in text, not in pictures

Item, condition, price and date are kept as text. Placed only inside images, none of it reaches search engines or generative AI answers. The record accumulating is itself the search strategy.

4. Easy to tap, easy to read

17px body text, 1.9 line height, buttons at least 52px tall, and pinch zoom left enabled. A photo appraisal request is complete after three fields.

5. A page that works like an app (PWA)

In this trade, someone who visited once often fails to find the site again when the next item comes up, and that is where inquiries are lost. Placed on the home screen, the shop can reach that customer directly with items in demand and campaigns.

The year after launch

• Search optimisation (SEO) plus measures for being cited in AI answers (AEO and GEO)
• Advertising management, with monthly reporting on rankings and inquiry numbers
• Purchase records and announcements updated by the shop itself
• Server and domain management, copy corrections, and fault response

A field for the antique dealer licence number and a page for the statutory commercial transaction notice are both built in from the start.

The colour scheme can be switched on the page itself, so it can be compared directly.