insideBIGDATA Interview: Mary Cameron, Data Scientist at Tophatter

I recently caught up with Mary Cameron, Data Scientist at Tophatter, to get her compelling insights into how Tophatter uses the principles of data science. She also delves into her life as a data scientist at a dynamic and growing company. Mary received her PhD from Stanford University and leads data science at Tophatter, Inc. At work, she uses math, computers, and data to solve problems. Tophatter is a pioneer in the mobile discovery shopping category. With more than 12 million users around the world, the company is on track to grow over 100% in 2017, selling $1M of product a day.

Daniel D. Gutierrez — Managing Editor, insideBIGDATA

insideBIGDATA: Can you tell us about how Tophatter uses data science, for example understanding how AI and machine learning can help personalize a mobile shopping experience?

Mary Cameron: Tophatter is a discovery shopping platform where users can view and bid on jewelry, electronics, apparel, home, beauty and other items in online auctions in real time. Each auction is fast–about 90 seconds–creating the engagement of a game. We have about 12 million users around the world and the company is on track to grow over 100% in 2017, hitting about $350 million of sales this year.

Ultimately, we use data to describe our users, describe our products, and model the interactions between those two, to make the process more enjoyable for both our buyers and our partner sellers. For our sellers, it means carefully selecting items for auction that encourage competitive bidding, but still allow shoppers to get a great deal. For our shoppers, it includes predicting which products they may be interested in, based on items they’ve previously liked or what similar shoppers have liked in the past.

It’s also important that we maintain product variety, so that our customers are delighted to see new items each time they come back to the app or website. We’re doing a good job if shoppers think “I didn’t know I wanted this!” There are a lot of moving parts, but ultimately, the better we can understand and predict the patterns in our marketplace, the more enjoyable the experience can be. Here, data science can be a very powerful tool.

Read the full article here.