How to build a smart and socially aware marketplace
By: Sahar Cohen, R&D Team lead at Snappy
How do you send a million gifts worldwide in only three months? How do you handle thousands of orders at the same time? How do you make the experience joyful and easy?
Building a marketplace is a complex process for any e-commerce company due to a number of aspects such as product curation, product management, supply management, data management, etc. At Snappy, the challenge is bigger due to the unique service we offer to our customers: gifting.
Snappy helps people and organisations to show appreciation and recognition to their employees and peers by creating a joyful gifting experience. We have developed an automated platform through which they can send gifts easily and without entering their mailing address. So basically, the sender buys virtual gifts, and the recipients enter our marketplace and have the freedom to choose the gift they would like to be delivered to them.
Snappy in a Snap-Shot
2000+ companies in more than 75 countries already use Snappy to gift their employees and customers
30% Our clients include 30% of the fortune 100 companies
Our marketplace offers a variety of more than 30,000 gifts
Over 1M Snappy Gifts were delivered in Q4 2021 alone.
What makes our marketplace smart?
Most e-commerce companies simply show the products with their prices and calculate the shipping cost after the users choose the product and enter their address. In Snappy, our goal is to create a unique gifting experience that is different from simply shopping online. We want it to be special, fun, and intuitive, like receiving a physical gift. Therefore, the recipients immediately see only the assortment of relevant gifts for them to choose from, without revealing their prices, and without the need to enter their address.
What do I mean by “relevant gifts”?
We show only gifts that:
- Available
- Can be shipped to the recipient’s geographic zone.
- Are within the sender’s budget (after calculating the shipping cost)
The challenge is to make a personalised verification within seconds of entering our app and to offer the right selection of items. As you can tell, we do everything to create an amazing experience for our customers, which requires a strong and sensitive backend architecture.
To achieve this goal, we create collections of gifts that are relevant for specific countries and try to calculate the shipping ahead of time, so the price won’t exceed the buyer’s budget. These steps must happen quickly and very frequently, before the user sees the gifts, since we avoid showing a gift that cannot be delivered
For that reason, it’s important that we automate every possible step in our systems. We have established integrations with partners and suppliers that help automate the processes of updating prices and availability of more than 40,000 items we have in our marketplace.
Creating a socially aware marketplace
Our latest project also reflects the Snappy core values and our focus on giving back to the community. Out of our over 2,000 suppliers, we wanted to elevate businesses owned and operated by underrepresented people, and shine a spotlight on them to boost their sales and awareness. My team created special hashtags for categories such as: Small business, woman-owned, Sustainable, LGBTQ- owned, Charitable- Giving and more. We do it in collaboration with those businesses in order to increase their exposure. At the same time, we allow our clients to support causes in which they believe, by choosing to buy from these businesses. Knowing that this feature has increased the engagement of customers with small or social businesses makes us even more motivated to work on more innovative projects, social and others.
If you have any questions or new ideas for us, please feel free to contact me: Sahar Cohen
