BigoIraqBigoIraq

BigoIraq is a live web storefront where people in Iraq buy BIGO LIVE diamonds — the in-app currency viewers send as gifts to streamers, and streamers top up for themselves. It is Arabic-first, with English and Kurdish (Sorani), and designed for the phone first.

Its promise is mechanical rather than decorative: once a payment is confirmed, the order is fulfilled automatically through a live supplier integration, instead of waiting for someone to process it by hand.

On BIGO LIVE, viewers buy diamonds to send to streamers as gifts. In Iraq, many of them can't easily pay with an international card, and buying from an informal reseller on social media usually means a person processing every order by hand. The payment methods people actually have — AsiaCell and Zain Iraq recharge cards — matter as much as the catalogue.

Build a storefront people in Iraq can trust with their money, and that delivers without a person in the loop.

End-to-end Product, UI/UX & Technical Lead. I took BigoIraq from A to Z: the domain and hosting, the product plan and its rules, the UX and the visual identity, the frontend and the backend, the payment and supplier integrations, the three languages, deployment and launch — and the testing, troubleshooting and iterations since. AI-assisted development is part of how I build; the product, its decisions and its delivery are mine.

Two ways to pay share one destination. A wallet payment is confirmed on the spot; a recharge card is checked by the team first and credited to the wallet. Either way, the same fulfilment step delivers the diamonds — confirming a payment is what triggers it.

The design system's north star: calm and trustworthy first, premium second — on a product that moves people's money, decoration loses to clarity.

• Gold is the only colour that means “click me”. Every real action, and text on gold is always dark.
• The flag is literal, once. The real flag appears in the hero and nowhere else — never tiled, never a motif.
• Status colours aren't brand colours. Each order stage — paid, processing, awaiting review, completed, refunded — has its own colour, so the team can read a queue at a glance.
• Each typeface has one job. Cairo for headlines, prices and diamond counts; Tajawal for reading; Reem Kufi only for the Takbir in the flag.

Arabic is the default reading direction, and the layout is built around it. In the hero the flag takes the start side and the copy the end side — defined by direction, not by left and right — so the English version mirrors itself without a second layout. Kurdish (Sorani), the third language, reads right to left too.

Designed for the phone first: the two actions take the full width, and the header keeps only what a thumb needs — the menu, the account and a direct way to top up. The site is installable as a web app.

A Node.js and Express backend over MySQL, with a framework-free JavaScript frontend. Fulfilment calls the supplier's API the moment a payment is confirmed; USDT payments are integrated through NOWPayments; customers can sign in with Google.

Payments that need a person meet a separate admin, with roles to match: the owner has full access, and every other capability — approving or declining a payment, managing staff, reading the audit log — is a permission granted one at a time. Approving and declining run as single, locked operations, so a payment approved twice is still delivered once, and every administrative action is written to an audit log. The admin isn't shown here: it's private, and it holds real customers' data.

BigoIraq runs on its own domain, with the storefront, the admin and the API on separate addresses and separate customer and admin sessions. Database changes are written so they can be re-applied safely on every deploy, and new features are tested end to end on the live system before customers rely on them. Every change since launch is recorded in a dated changelog — features, fixes and the decisions behind them.

BigoIraq is live at bigoiraq.com: an Arabic-first storefront in three languages, paid for with the methods people in Iraq have, and fulfilled automatically once a payment is confirmed.