From startup to full-blown profitable product

Since Allegro Lokalnie had small marketing budgets, we focused on two pivot points: retention and engagement of current users, and getting new ones through SEO.

As the platform grew, we were asked to analyze the costs of all cloud services Lokalnie is using. It turned out that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) had the highest cost. Allegro Lokalnie made a decision to look into this part, and so we did it. By doing a series of technical tweaks, we were able to reduce the GCP costs by 80%. Read more here.

With limited marketing budgets, organic traffic became a crucial growth channel. You can read here how we have contributed to product growth through technical SEO. We also systematically improved Core Web Vitals and implemented parallel website loading to reduce loading times. We optimized inactive offers indexing, integrated with Allegro's main SEO admin panel, and built dedicated SEO solutions to accelerate rank growth. The SEO-compliant optimization of the main site header was also future-proofed for monetization. These technical improvements contributed to achieving ~10 million visits per week.

We’re navigating the category tree changes in the main Allegro service in a way that ensures great user experience for Allegro Lokalnie. We’re also allowing the users of Allegro to frictionlessly resale their purchases on Allegro Lokalnie — building retention for Allegro and boosting user base for Allegro Lokalnie. Although at first the estimate to deliver this functionality was 3 months, we leveraged pre-existing components to deliver in just 1 month.

One of the things we did for retention and engagement was building a mobile app. It allows us to build engagement through push notifications and reminders, we also channel the engagement triggers through email. The app was designed for intuitiveness and ease of use, so new people can have a frictionless onboarding. The metrics prove that this works. The development part of the mobile app was in entirety done by Appunite.

Cost effectiveness is one of the major incentives for C2C transactions, so we looked for ways to bolster it. The main Allegro service already had a free delivery program (called Allegro Smart), and there was a plan to implement this also for Allegro Lokalnie users but initially the idea seemed too big to implement quickly. We thought differently. We took the technical solution from the main Allegro platform, adjusted it to Lokalnie ecosystem, and in just 3 months implemented the first iteration of free deliveries. Then every 2 months we evaluated the viability of this feature and adjusted it further. Finally, we decided it’s achieving the success criteria of boosting sales. On the technical side, the free deliveries need a lot of integrations, so we created a microservice with the entire business logic, ready to be used for additional delivery providers. In result of this initiative, the sales increased +30% and have the architecture ready for future expansions.

Our team, as an integral part of Allegro Lokalnie product development department, works on fulfilling business goals, not features. The backlog is populated with things to be developed, driven by the Allegro Lokalnie product team, but we’re able to advise and decide: if the given feature is viable, when to implement it, how to implement it given the current business context, and how to measure its success. This is the core of our day-to-day decision making.

We have an extensive skill and knowledge range in our Allegro Lokalnie team, which allows us to make valid decisions and create robust business testing framework faster. We’re also making use of solutions that worked for similar problems in our other projects thus reducing time-to-market.

This is best portrayed through a concrete example. Our team was asked to gather data about all the third-party digital services that Allegro Lokalnie uses to function. The goal was cost-cutting. While creating the list, we assigned percentages of budget to each of them. We then broken down the highest-spending services into sub-services. This allowed us to notice use-and-spend patterns. Allegro Lokalnie made the decision to focus on one of the services first, so we created a document where we described the status quo and the desired state of use-and-spend patterns. This allowed us to systematically work on optimizing them. As a result, we were able to reduce the spend on the most expensive service by 45%.