Loves Semprong now owns its storefront

Loves Semprong is a semprong and kue gapit brand that has spent years building a real following: the kind of product people buy in tens, put in hampers, and resell in their own cities. For most of that time, the way to buy it was through an Indonesian marketplace, or by chatting with customer service on WhatsApp.

Then the marketplace math started to move. They reached out to us. Three months of research and building later, their own ecommerce application is live at lovessemprong.com. Their store, their customer list, their database.

Renting shelf space, or owning the store

Marketplaces are a good way to start selling. They are a harder way to keep selling.

Every order that goes through one carries a fee you do not set and cannot negotiate, and that fee has a habit of moving in one direction. More importantly, you do not own what sits underneath the transaction. The buyer belongs to the platform. The pricing rules belong to the platform. So does the data: who reorders, who is growing, which city is quietly becoming your best market. You see whatever slice the platform decides to show you.

None of that matters much when marketplaces are cheap. It matters a great deal when they are not.

That is the moment Loves Semprong called us. Not to leave marketplaces, since they still sell there and should, but to stop being a tenant everywhere. The ask was to own a channel: a storefront on their own domain, running on their own database, where the customer relationship and the margin are theirs.

We think that is the right instinct, and we think more Indonesian brands are about to reach the same conclusion. Owning your channel stops being a vanity project the moment the fees you pay for someone else's audience grow faster than your margin does. Then it is just arithmetic.

The other half of the problem

There was a second thing going on, and it turned out to be the bigger build.

Loves Semprong does not only sell to individuals. It sells to a whole ladder of buyers: dropshippers, resellers, and agen, each on different pricing, different minimums, different terms. That entire business ran through WhatsApp.

Which meant customer service spent the day as a typist. Look up which tier this buyer is on. Look up that tier's price for this product. Add it up by hand. Type an invoice. Send it. Then answer "sudah dikirim belum?" forty more times before closing.

Every one of those minutes was a minute not spent on the thing that actually grows the business: moving buyers up the ladder. A dropshipper who is ready to be a reseller, and a reseller ready to become an agen, are worth far more than a perfectly typed invoice. Nobody had time to look.

So the brief was never just "build a website." It was: give the buyers a way to serve themselves, and give the team back the hours.

What we built

Two applications over one shared backend: a storefront for buyers, an operations portal for the team.

For their buyers, the storefront knows who you are. Sign in and you see your own prices, because tier pricing is built into the catalogue rather than bolted on: four buyer tiers, per-tier minimums, and a volume ladder that rewards bigger orders. Place an order and the invoice generates itself, as a proper PDF, ready to send. Ask for a tier upgrade and there is a form for it instead of a negotiation over chat. Track your own delivery instead of asking someone to check.

For their team, the portal is where the business actually runs:

• Orders and invoicing. Staff can build an order on a customer's behalf, at the right tier price, with the invoice and payment instructions attached.
• Payments and finance. Sales records a payment, finance verifies it, overpayment is credited back to the buyer's balance instead of becoming an awkward WhatsApp conversation, and refunds produce a real memo.
• Fulfillment. Pick lists, packing slips, scan-based packing and delivery, waybills, and delivery proof photos, so "where is it" has an answer that does not require phoning the warehouse.
• Their own courier. Loves Semprong delivers a lot of its own orders, so we modelled their in-house courier properly, down to per-tier delivery rates that vary by city.
• The tier pipeline. Upgrade requests arrive as a queue to review each morning. This is the flow the whole project was really for.
• Pre-orders. Scheduled orders with a preparation calendar, so production can see what is coming rather than reacting to it.
• Vouchers. Promotional codes scoped to specific tiers, kept deliberately separate from structural tier pricing so a promo can never quietly rewrite the price list.
• Roles. Owner, finance, ops, warehouse, sales, CS, driver, and packer each sign in to their own surface and see only what their job needs.
• Insights. A built-in dashboard, so the questions that used to require exporting a spreadsheet now have a screen. Their data, in their database, on their terms.

Three months, prototype to live

We started in April with a clickable prototype: no backend, no database, just the flows made real enough to argue about. That is deliberate. It is much cheaper to discover you scoped something wrong while it is still a mock than after it has a schema.

Through May it became a real system: a proper backend, their own database, the tier engine, the catalogue, checkout. June and July were operations: fulfillment, finance verification, roles, insights, the courier, the hundred small things that only surface once actual staff use the thing for actual orders.

By July it was live on their own domain, running their business.

We are not finished

The part we are most pleased about is not the launch. It is that the release cadence has not slowed down since.

Every week there is another piece of manual work to remove: a report someone was still assembling by hand, a step in packing that took one click too many, a screen that made sense to us and not to the person using it eight hours a day. That is the work now, and it is the good part. A platform like this does not get valuable at launch. It gets valuable on the fiftieth improvement, when the team stops noticing it and just gets on with the day.

Thank you to the Loves Semprong team for trusting us with something this close to the centre of their business. We are thrilled to keep building it with you.

If you are running a brand that has outgrown chat and spreadsheets, or you have done the marketplace fee math and did not like the answer, talk to us.