Leveraging big data, Snapdeal launches personal shopping guide Smartfeed

eBay-backed online marketplace Snapdeal has launched Smartfeed - a personal shopping guide for its customers. It provides users personalized shopping ideas and a trending list of products which are popular on the platform and relevant for the specific user.

With this new feature, the Delhi-based company also integrated Doozton.com (a product discovery platform) which was acquired by Snapdeal earlier this year.

Shopping ideas is an in-house product discovery platform built on Hadoop and other big data technologies, crunching over 3 billion data points daily for over five million users. It considers all the user interactions of the users across the five million catalog size and finally recommends over 1000 products to the user based on their personalized interests, similar user classification, current purchase trends and future behavior prediction.

Trending Now (bundled feature with Smartfeed) analyses user visits across the entire catalog real time and allows them to browse and shop for the most popular products on the platform across categories that are relevant for each specific user.

Outlining the importance of personalization, SVP, Product Management at Snapdeal Ankit Khanna said, “Given the size of selection of products that Snapdeal offers, we believe the key lies in personalizing the shopping experience online to match their experience in the offline store. Smartfeed has been launched in line with this and we hope to see a positive response from our customers.”

Brainchild of Pushpendra Singh, an IIT Roorkee graduate, Doozton was acquired by Snapdeal in April this year. Smartfeed currently covers 20% of the Snapdeal user base and the company plans to extend this feature to its entire user base within the next three months.

Snapdeal has been very busy of late with its acquisition of Shopo.in, funding from eBay, online learning and education among others.

Smartfeed will help Snapdeal in obtaining deeper customer data like popular products among particular age group. Further, it will provide better insights into buying behaviour. The roll out of Smartfeed also proves the acquisition of Doozton was well thought strategy for the company.

With the increasing competition to grab more marketshare, the horizontal e-commerce players are leveraging data in a big way. Recently, Flipkart selected 75,000 customers for its subscription based service Flipkart First. The service includes exclusive benefits along with priority servicing features.

The launch of this feature marks the integration of Doozton.com (a product discovery platform) which was acquired by the company earlier this year with Snapdeal’s existing recommendation and personalization technologies. In line with the company’s efforts for providing a personalized shopping experience to its customers, Smartfeed comprises two personalized features – Shopping Ideas and Trending Now.