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Customer Story

Marktplaats Provides Personal Experience for Over Two Million Daily Visitors

The Netherlands’ favorite online marketplace increases user time on platform by 3.5% with machine learning

Related services
Data Technology, Software Development

Industry
Retail

Company
GoDataDriven | Part of Xebia

Founded in 1999, the Dutch classified advertising site Marktplaats pioneered the concept of recycling castoffs and helping customers find things they need at reasonable prices. With millions of items listed for sale, it quickly grew in popularity and was sold for €225 million to American Internet giant eBay in 2004. Marktplaats currently publishes 350 thousand new ads every day and over 8 million unique users browse its 11 million live listings every month.
Why
Increase homepage relevance by offering a personalized shopping experience
What
Optimize homepage with more relevant offers based on search and recommender systems for clothes and cars categories
How
Create a data science competency in the organization

From Collecting to Predicting

Offering a personalized shopping experience to over two million unique website visitors per day isn’t easy, especially when you advertise nearly eleven million items. Although Marktplaats was already using data to optimize its platform, the organization needed to improve its user experience and the overall effectiveness of its ads.

Creating Data Competency

Help Marktplaats optimize content based on available user data and provide more relevant offers to its users by implementing technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, R, Python, Java, and Scala.

“Xebia helped us create a data science competency within our organization.”
Marktplaats
Rutger Mooy Senior Data Pioneer at eBay Classifieds

A Data-Driven Future

Marktplaats' optimized homepage led to a 3.5% increase in time spent on the platform and more paid and unpaid clicks. The entire organization has embraced the data-driven approach, and it is actively expanding its product teams with more data scientists. Other eBay labels have created and introduced smart data applications combined with technological developments based on Marktplaats's positive experiences. For example, image recognition now makes it even easier for sellers to place ads.

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