Dear Valued Seller,

We had receive feedbacks about Lelong’s interface and navigation and ever since last year, we’ve been discussing how to integrate and roll out a revamp site properly. The revamp site needs to be much more user-friendly and provide a better user experience.

7 months to date, as we’ve been hinting on several occasions, today we are pleased to announce that a brand new Lelong interface will be live by End of July.

It will be a total revamp of what you see currently, so in this post, I’ll be sharing briefly on what to expect and how this revamp will impact you.

Why Revamp?

There were many reasons to do so, but if we were to sum it up, it all about providing the best user experience. It means as a user, you will be able to:

• Find it easier to navigate – from browsing to purchase
• Easier to compare and digest information – both products and seller performance
• More curated deals – local or international

While the above is more suited for a buyer, rest assured that sellers get some dedicated update too – a brand new store builder – which I will share in a bit.

The Rollout Plan

There were a lot of things to do – from cosmetic changes to functional changes i.e. a much more intelligent search system, a revised category tree, seller panel and many more. We had to prioritize based on urgency and resources, all in all, here is what you can expect in phases:

Phase 1 – Revised UI / UX

By end of July, you will be able to see a brand new Lelong with a cleaner layout. The changes will be applied sitewide & across all channels – which means every page on Lelong Desktop / Mobile Web / App will be revamped (except seller’s store, which I’ll explain later).

This brand new layout will remove the clutter and help users to focus on necessary information – from browsing to purchase. Here is some wireframe to satiate your curiosity.

On-going development @ Lelong front page, actual product may vary,

Other than the homepage, the product posting page will also get a brand new look. If you noticed on the screenshot down below, you will find out a few things:

• Seller’s ratings are now displayed in blocks
• The product images are now displayed in sequence on the left
• Seller logo will be displayed on top of seller ID label
• Store banners are removed from product posting page

I want to precisely explain on the last point why store banners are removed compared to before, as a marketplace, we spend a huge sum on advertising, we ran into several issues on product postings page to the point where Google banned us from advertising – where the main culprit is the store banner.

We had some struggles, one is about store branding, where the other one is about helping sellers to get more sales through advertising. So when we were discussing the revamp, this was factored in where we created the seller logo section as studies have shown that people recognize logos better.

Lelong brand new product page, actual product and labels may look different.

Phase 2 – Seller Store Builder (early August)

This is where it will impact you the most.

Compared to our old-school functional store templates, the brand new store builder will allow you to create customized templates based on your liking.

We will be sharing more information about the store builder in coming weeks and exact things that you need to prepare beforehand so we can smoothen the transition when this goes live.

Basically, the idea is to enable sellers like you to create a store layout like Official Stores on Lmall.my or even more complex templates based on your liking.

A simple layout like Elianto, you can actually create sliders too.

Or create something like Thermos. It’s flexible.

Or you can create banner sliders on your own!

The store builder is designed to be flexible enough for you to build your own store and select whichever modules that you prefer. Pretty cool, huh?

Once again, more information will be shared with you in coming weeks to prepare you for the brand new store builder.

On-going – Category Tree

This is a work in progress (WIP) as it is too massive to clean up in a go. To help you understand better, Lelong has 35 main categories which branch out into hundreds of sub-categories where it branches again.

It’s massive.

We started working on some categories a month ago, a changelog will be hosted on this blog to keep you posted on the changes.

Conclusion

For now we will be rolling out front-end changes first, then followed by seller store builder. There are a lot more changes on the way as we are working around the clock to get it done, so stay tuned on this blog to keep track of the changes.