An idea for the letgo app

letgo is a great alternative to listing products on Craigslist, KSL Classifieds, or eBay.

But the app has a screen that needs replaced or improved: the Notifications screen.

To me, these notification are annoying and the screen doesn’t solve a real user problem.

It shows when a user has favorited your product. But favoriting your product doesn’t seem to matter much. As a seller, I don’t care much that someone has favorited my product. If they really liked it, they’d buy it, right? But I’ve never had someone favorite my product and then later buy it. Also, I don’t want to “Check out their profile”.

It seems that letgo is using this screen as a way to increase engagement. Users receive a notification each time someone favorites their product, some opening the app to check who and what.

I recognize that the “favorite” functionality serves a purpose. It gives buyers a way to tag products that they like for future reference, but as a seller, it doesn’t help me much.

But it could.

A Price Reduced screen

letgo should replace the Notification screen with a “Price Reduced” screen. This would likely:

1. Help sellers sell their stuff

2. Increase user engagement

3. Increase retention

4. Further differenciate letgo from the competition

A new Price Reduced screen would show products that were recently reduced in price. Second to the home screen, I anticipate this would be the second-most viewed screen in the app.

Along with the new screen, an addition to the “favorite” functionality could be that buyers who have favorited a product would receive a notification when the price of that product is reduced.

A Price Reduced screen could really help sellers sell their stuff. But sometimes they get their prices wrong. Currently, changing the price doesn’t “bump” their product to the top, so it just sits buried and unsold.

Take me for example. I currently have 39 things listed for sale on letgo. I want to sell all of that stuff! There is a chance that someone will search for my specific items, but it’s likely that I just overpriced them. I received interest in several items when I first listed them, because they showed up on the Home screen, but after that, the interest has declined to almost zero. If I reduce the price, shoppers will still have to search for the specific item in order to see it. I don’t want to delete and relist at a lower price because that is a pain. But I’d be willing to lower the price a little to get it sold.

How the Price Reduced screen could work

The Price Reduced screen could work like this:

Sellers can edit their items and reduce the price, and all price reductions that meet certain criteria would appear on the Price Reduced screen.

For items $1- $24, a price reduction of $1 or more will show up in the Price Reduced screen. For items $25 – $50, a price reduction of $5 or more will show up in the Price Reduced screen. For items $51+, a price reduction of $10 or more will show up in the Price Reduced screen.

Buyers would receive a notification when the price is reduced on an item they’ve favorited.

A limit to the number of price reductions made to one product could be implemented to reduce abuse by sellers who set prices high at first and reduce the price often to get their product to appear at the top of the Price Reduced screen.

. . .

Do you have other ideas for the Price Reduced or Notification screens? Feel free to share your idea below.