How A Young Product Manager Turned his Idea Into A Business Using Templatic Classifieds Directory Template
Posted onMybudak.com is a kids marketplace in Malaysia built using the Classifieds Directory Template where the users can post a free advertisement of their products and can also view the products that are on sale and they can buy.
Mr. Lucas Lee, the owner of the website, shares his inspiring thoughts about Classifieds Directory Theme, and the story of the development of MyBudak.
Tell Us About Yourself & The Site
I am a Product Manager for a Job Portal with a technical background in software development.
MyBudak.com is an online marketplace to buy and sell items for babies and kids. It is a single platform for Malaysian parents to search, buy and sell items, which are in good condition and no longer needed.
It is also a place to help vendors and business owners to grow their business in this niche marketplace for babies and kids. Sellers can post free classified ads to sell pre-loved items or promote brand new products.
What inspired you to build the My Budak Site?
I realized that babies and kids’ items are very expensive and are quickly outgrown. It’s easily become no longer fit and needed. Instead of keeping it at home and collecting dust, I want to provide a single platform for parents to easily remove the unwanted items in exchange for cash. They can then use the cash to buy something else useful for their kids. Besides, instead of always purchasing brand new items, parents can look for nearly new items and buy at bargain prices. I also hope that my site will encourage parents to donate unwanted kids’ items and help the less fortunate one.
For parents who prefer to purchase new items, I hope that with a dedicated marketplace like this for kids, with many vendors offering various choices, they will have more options to compare the prices and find the best deal. In the end of the day, I hope this will help parents to save money and at the same time it helps business owners to increase their sales.
What would you say was the reason which made you choose Templatic?
I have done a lot of research on other plugins before I’ve decided to choose Templatic.
I really loved the design, especially the dedicated mobile app view. It’s clean, slick and very mobile friendly. Besides, the features offered by Templatic is very comprehensive. It’s so easy to setup and customize according to my needs.
It’s basically almost a complete solution to run an online classified website.
What are the challenges you had to overcome while developing the site?
MyBudak.com has only started for about 4 months. In these early days, it is quite challenging to get the contents. No one would be interested in listing their items on a new website that basically have no visitors. It’s a classic chicken and egg problem. I knew that we can play the chicken’s role and started to approach few vendors and offer to help and list their items on our site for free. As we focus on getting more and more contents, we started to see traction on our site with organic traffic.
Did you find the theme’s packages powerful enough?
The theme has a lot of functionalities that I believe will take me months if not years to develop. It is so flexible to change the layout with the various widgets available. I can always tweak and change the design with easy drag and drop. Besides, it is also very easy to customize the CSS and front end UI. I am also impressed with the rating and reviews feature as I think it is crucial in today’s online shopping experience. Buyers would like to check what others have said about the products before deciding to make the purchase.
What is the monetization strategy for your site?
To be honest, I have no plan to monetize the website at the moment. Submitting a listing will be completely free. I started this project as an experiment and I think the knowledge gained will be more valuable. My focus now is to improve the user experience, optimize the performance and further polish the SEO in order to get more traffic.
If we focus on improving the products and solve the actual user’s problems, money will come later. Focusing on monetization at this early stage is destined for failure.
Which would you say is the best feature or features of the theme?
The dedicated mobile app view. Usage of mobile is increasing rapidly and it is important to have an optimum mobile user experience.
With all the available add-ons, do you find the theme scalable enough for your project?
Yes. I have already purchased a few paid add-ons and installed some free one. I believe Templatic is listening to the customer feedback and that is why many useful add-ons are made available.
Mega Menu: Free Templatic Add-on to display mega menu
List Filter: The main purpose of the List Filter add-on is to provide the site visitors a simpler and easier way to search what they’re looking for.
Were you able to easily add your site identity to the theme?
Yes. It is very simple and easy to customize. You do not need to know any coding in order to do that.
Tell us if there a particular feature you’d want to see in the Directory in the future?
- Ability to chat and send messages to the inbox. If the seller logs into the website, he should be able to view all the unseen messages from the buyers.
- Ability to customize the template for Mobile App View by adding widgets. Currently, there is no template for Mobile.
What Mr. Lucas said about Templatic?
Very nice theme with the excellent support team. The support team is always there to help. They are doing a fantastic job for me so far. Keep it up!
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Thanks to Mr. Lucas for his honest answers and collaborating on this case study with us.
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