What’s new in Leadbox’s Website 5.3 Release

By Renold Liu

August 21, 2020

The Leadbox core website team is excited to announce the release of 5.3 for the Leadbox website platform!

This release includes:

Major enhancements for easier customizations and styling
UX enhancements to the vehicle filters
Speed enhancements
Various Bug Fixes

Let’s take a look!

Webhooks for all components!

One of the most common requests to customize a dealer’s website is to add additional items before or after a component.

For example, many dealers want to add an additional button in the CTA or a banner after the header.

To facility this, our developers would have to modify the component in a customization rendering it non-updateable in the future.

With the new webhooks before and after each component, developers can now safely add customizations before and after the component easily and without fear of losing updates.

Each component has 4 hooks

Before the component div
Before the component content inside the div
After the component content inside the div
After the component div

This flexibility will allow the deploy and customization team to easily make modifications to the client site with making that component ineligible for updates.

A list of all components webhooks is available in the developer wiki

https://dev.azure.com/leadbox/Websites%20V5/_wiki/wikis/Websites-V5.wiki/25/Webhooks

Unique CSS Classes for all components

Similar to webooks, many dealers request style change to their components such as adding a background image, changing the border color, etc.

While certainly possible to achieve without unique css component classes, adding generic styling can be tricky and may inadvertently modify the style of other components.

Now with Unique CSS classes for all components, developers can more easily pin point where the style customizations appear.

A list of unique CSS classes is available in the developer wiki

https://dev.azure.com/leadbox/Websites%20V5/_wiki/wikis/Websites-V5.wiki/26/Components-classes-and-.json-enumerations

Consistent Vehicle Card image sizes

All vehicle cards will now display a 4×3 ratio image regardless of what ratio the uploaded image will be.

Previously, if a dealer uploaded an vehicle image in a portrait format, that image would be displayed on the website in whichever image ratio it was uploaded.

This caused the vehicle cards to not line up correctly and layout consistency issues.

Now all vehicle card images will be the same ratio and size on all vehicle cards providing a unified view and experience across the entire site.

Lazy loading vehicle card and line up images

In order to speed up load times for our website, All Vehicle card and vehicle lineup images will be lazy loaded.

Lazy loading (also called on-demand loading) is a website speed optimization technique.

Instead of loading the entire web page and rendering it to the user in one go as in bulk loading, the concept of lazy loading assists in loading only viewable images and delays the remaining, until it is seen by the shopper.

Release notes

Full release notes can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XqmJs-rBsoFxanUG25g8nS38djjyRI6Cwj9ph1v0sv8/edit#gid=0

What’s Planned for next release

Next release we are continue to focus on dipping our toes into personalization and advertising tracking

Previously view vehicles widget
Unified tracking configuration for Leadbox Advertising
UX designs for “MyGarage”

What’s Planned for Future releases

We are looking into how to add more functionality for dealers to see a shopper’s browsing behaviour by adding some shopper centric items.

For example:

Subscribing to Price alerts.
- Shoppers will be able to subscribe to a price alert on a vehicle. Should the vehicle’s price change the shopper will be notified via email to come back to the site.
- Dealers will be able to get a list of people who are interested in the vehicle, but perhaps not at the listed price. Dealers can then reach out to customers with a potential alternative price to sell the vehicle
Subscribing to Searches
- Shoppers will be able to subscribe to a search with certain criteria. If a vehicle that matches that criteria is added to the inventory, the shopper will be notified to come back to the site.
- Dealers will be provided with a shopper’s preference on a vehicle and to offer to source a similar vehicles.