Carousell on How To Use Various Tools to Utilise Data Analytics and Operate Effectively

Carousell - Top-of-mind for Reselling in SEA

Ask anyone about where to sell their secondhand goods. I guarantee that 99% of individuals would think of Carousell almost immediately. The platform has become synonymous with reselling, accepting all sorts of products and even listing services for hire. Take for example ticket scalpers on the platform - Blackpink Singapore May 2023 concert tickets were resold for up to S$3.5k on Carousell, nearly 10 times the selling price. And if you wanted to inhale the same ‘very rare air’ as celebrity Billie Eilish, a Carouseller going by the name rev1on has got you covered for S$15,000. Don’t ask me why 🤷

Getting to Know Carousell Group

Carousell Group is the leading multi-category platform for secondhand in Greater Southeast Asia “on a mission to inspire the world to start selling, and to make secondhand the first choice.” Founded in 2012 in Singapore, the Group has a leading presence in seven markets under the brands Carousell, Cho Tot, Laku6, Mudah.my, OneShift, Ox Luxe, Ox Street, and Refash, serving tens of millions of monthly active users. In 2016, Carousell launched in Australia. Co-founder and president of Carousell Marcus Tan explained then why Australia is the perfect market for Carousell, saying “If you look at the classifieds landscape in Australia, mobile is nowhere. It’s still very much a desktop-first process with Gumtree, but if you look at the people, everyone’s on a smartphone”.

Seller Segmentation, Super Important

With the goal of empowering ALL to sell, be it casual or business sellers trying to declutter or earn a side income, Carousell faces the obvious problem of seller segmentation – how to accurately identify the type of seller a user is – and the implications are huge. So, what are the challenges, solutions and results of effective segmentation?

Seller segmentation is an important piece at Carousell to be able to personalize content and promotions to sellers efficiently. A casual seller who just uses the platform to de-clutter versus a small business trying to kick start his MVP for a business has very different tools available to them to capitalize on the visibility and the conversions Carousell provides. The initial challenge was to categorize the sellers into businesses and casual users, the analytics team took on this challenge of solving this fuzzy complex problem. The approach was initially to find signals to classify business like or casual like behavior, we looked at signals like external links in listings, multi-platform behavior, volume of listings, liquidity of the listing, pre order, multi quantity listings were just a few to mention among the 180+ independent variables we had flowing into the model. After multiple iterations we arrived at classifying casual sellers with high accuracy so as not to err on wrongly classifying casual sellers as business users as it would be a bad experience for a casual user to be targeted with business-like messaging from the platform.

Finally, after running a few A/B tests on the results and tightening our accuracy windows we were able to efficiently target merchants with higher tier promotions, learning guides for monetizing the platform and train them on the seller tools for maximum throughput, while keeping our casual sellers to minimum messaging and reaching out based on listing performance only. This helped both the business to get its flywheel spinning for casual sellers and merchants being able to reach the right audience with the right seller tools. Overall helping increase liquidity for casuals on the platform and faster time to sell for merchants.

Key Metrics Carousell MUST Monitor

With strategies in place to segment sellers and support business growth, some important questions to ask are: How can Carousell quantify performance? Which specific metrics do we use to measure campaign performance, ROAS and success of A/B experiments?... Because, only in doing so can Carousell mine key actionable insights moving forward!

The first step to measuring success of any marketing campaign comes from a clean customer Customer Data Platform (CDP) with data stitched across multiple 3rd parties and 1st party data to tell a user story and journey on the app and how the user entered the app from which channel. Carousell data team takes immense pride in building an in-house customer CDP (We call it TESERACT internally like the Marvel cube to house infinite arrays of user behavior). This CDP powers all the marketing performance engines which we fine tune based on the desired outputs from the campaign from listing views, clicks, responses to transactions. This CDP also powers our internal A/B testing engine which can now look at complex signals like the campaign the user was targeted, the external media channel the user was acquired through which gives us capabilities to spend marketing $ wisely and most efficiently with precision. With this CDP in place, we can now have complex metrics to measure success like ROAS could be Responses per $ spent or Views per $ spent or Transactions per $ spent split by user channel and medium. Usually, the first step for any Marketing performance teams to have honest data conversations having a CDP as a single source of truth is a must!

Futureproofing Efforts @ Carousell

Beyond metrics, it is vital that Carousell futureproofs itself from new markets and new forms of competition. Strategies like two-sided Incentives for both buyer and sellers, maintaining positive CX and the use of AI/ML to streamline eCommerce insulates Carousell from threats that might lie ahead, as well as builds up its internal capabilities.

Carousell places itself at a very unique place in the industry as a C2C platform of choice in SE Asia. With a whole wider group of companies under the Carousell umbrella like Chotot, Mudah, Oxstreet, Oxluxe, Revo, Refash, Laku6 and more Carousell is able to provide value ad to the consumers in the form of authentication, extended warranties, sell to carousell program, financing for cars and a lot more. All these capabilities build a huge moat against any form of competition in the region while simultaneously upgrading our castle with new capabilities for our users which keeps all other competitors at bay. The most important thing Carousell focuses on is not on competition but on the intense focus on customer needs and the recent ventures at Carousell help us to work like a startup within a startup solving user needs like physical stores for second-hand fashion from Refash or authentication services for luxury handbags from Oxluxe or financing loans for Cars through Revo financial. With the new transactional models and capabilities across the horizontal helps Carousell with multiple business models and sources of revenue adding value to both buyers and sellers in the ecosystem!

A Positive Outlook for Carousell

The resale market is increasingly augmented by efforts to promote a more sustainable lifestyle and support a circular economy. This, coupled with the accelerated switch to online buying and selling, and Carousell’s continual moves to keep upgrading itself to create an unparalleled customer experience, means that Carousell is likely to see continued business growth. But as Carousell thrives, we will definitely have to contend with other new challenges such as fintech developments, emergence of The Metaverse and NEW ways of marketing, to say the least. As they say, “Change is the only constant.” Carousell will do well to embrace new challenges and make changes for the better. The only way is up!

This was a guest post by Vinol Joy D'souza, Head of Business Analytics (SE Asia), Carousell. Don’t miss out on his keynote panel “Shifting your digitalization focus from eCommerce to productivity, planning & engagement – How can you improve your predictive capabilities to better automate staff, stock, and inventory (and more) and become a guru at data-driven decision making to lead employee & customer engagement” on 15th February, Sheraton Grand Sydney Hyde Park!