Here are some helpful tips for building out a custom UI menu for your In-Island Transactions shop:
Graybox Your UI First
It’s always a good idea to build your UI using simple shapes and text before adding polish, complex UI materials, and fancy animations. This will help you focus and iterate on the layout and visual hierarchy before spending a lot of time on the details.
Use Existing UI Assets to Help Get Started
You can find a few useful UI art materials in the Fortnite > UI > Materials folder in UEFN, such as M_UI_TextureMask that you can use to draw frames around your item icons, or M_UI_TextureEffects if you want create a pixelated visual effect. See UI Materials Collection for more info.
Additionally, there are a lot of UI art examples in the User Interfaces Feature Example you can migrate to your project. You can even find UI materials to let you use SDF images as your icons, in case, for example, you want to show your icons across a large variety of scales and/or add things like borders and shadows to them.
Make sure to check out the two example shop menus already included in the feature example:
Separate Verse Offers From Your UI Menus
It’s a good practice to build your UI shop menu to be modular and kept separate from the Verse code defining your offers. You can see an example of this in the UI Feature Example, in shop_setup_device_template.verse and link_volume_to_shop_device.
Follow the In-Island Transactions Device Verse Template
Offers are created in Verse. A handy template is included in UEFN to help you get started. It even includes example offers and bundles, as well as Verse code to open the default shop menu.
Four Things to Consider for Your In-Island Transactions Shop
You built the shop, you placed the offers, and players are now visiting your island. The conversion rate tells you most of them are leaving without buying anything. Here’s some ideas about how to read the signals and improve your shop UI.
1. Players Often Scan Without Reading
A player who opens your in-island transactions shop usually spends roughly three seconds on their first pass. In that scan, they register the largest visual element on screen, the first item with a visible price, and whether anything clearly tells them what to do next. If none of those three things communicate value, they close the shop.
The shop description, carefully named items, and lore you built around each offer - none of that often lands in the first scan. Since the scan is entirely visual and entirely about trust, focus on building trust first. It’s your choice whether you want your offers to be steeped in mystery and lore but be sure to always make it clear to the player what their purchase actually does.
2. Trust Signals
Think about these six questions for your shop:
Question 1. Can players tell what the item does from the name alone? "Extra Life Token" is better than “Lost Relic”.
Question 2. How well does the description explain the gameplay function? Descriptive text about the item’s backstory is less immediately useful.
Question 3. Is the preview image easy to see? A blurry or cropped thumbnail can be confusing to the player.
Question 4. Is it clear whether an item is permanent or single-use? Permanent items are called “durable” and are different from items that vanish after being consumed.
Question 5. Is the price clearly visible without scrolling?
Question 6. Did you provide after-purchase feedback? That’s a great opportunity to show the player what they gained and how to best make use of it.
3. If Everything Is Featured, Nothing Is
If using the default shop UI, consider reserving the offer in the first position for your strongest item, since all configured offers appear at a consistent visual weight.
If you have more than six to eight offers, consider removing the lowest-conversion items. Fewer well-presented offers usually outperform a full catalog.
If using a custom shop UI, consider adding a hero slot to show off your best offer. This offer can be set apart from the others by being more visually distinctive (e.g., display size, white space).
4. Document What You Change
Look at your current conversion rate from the Creator Portal, the date, and exactly what you are changing and why. Without that record, any improvement or decline in conversion is information you cannot act on. You will not know what caused the change.
Also, change one thing at a time and consider giving each change two weeks of data before evaluating. The Creator Portal gives you conversion rate, D1 retention, and D7 retention. Track all three when you make a change, not just conversion.