Yad2 Case Study

Yad2

Based in Israel and founded in 2005, Yad2 is one of the most popular online marketplaces in the country. With hundreds of thousands of listings everyday, users can find a wide-range of second-hand goods; from real-estate, cars, homegoods, and even pets.

Business Challenge

For quite some time, Yad2 was aware that users strongly desired some form of communication between buyers and sellers beyond phone calls for a number of reasons, the first being that chat is a much simpler and faster way to communicate. Shlomi Otmazgin, Yad2 CTO, elaborates that “users don’t always want to make a phone call or video call. If interested in something, they can see it clearly in the marketplace and immediately reach out to the seller using chat. For the user, chat is not complex, and much less of a time and social investment.”

Yad2 also sought to implement chat in large part due to the safety and security it would provide. Between buyers and sellers, chat allows for complete anonymity and can keep sensitive information such as phone numbers private, properly ensuring customer data is protected.

With these business challenges in mind, Yad2 began its search for a third-party chat solution that would elevate the marketplace’s user experience to greater heights.

Why Yad2 Chose Sendbird

Initially, Yad2 had considered building chat in-house, as they perceived basic two-way messaging as fairly simple to develop. However, their team soon realized that creating the seamless and rich chat experience that users would expect was much more challenging than originally hypothesized. Otmazgin states, “at the beginning, we thought that building chat would not be too difficult. However, when we dove in, we realized that chat is actually so complex. It’s not just a simple database between two sides of chat; when you bring in other features such as multithreading, you encounter obstacles you never even thought you would deal with.” With Yad2’s lean team, combined with the necessary maintenance, uptime, and ensuring proper performance, outsourcing to a third-party vendor was a quick and easy decision.

Yad2’s mission has been to continually develop the best marketplace available in Israel, and maintaining this focus was consistent with finding the appropriate chat vendor. “We were looking for a solution that would give us all the table stakes features that we needed such as file and picture sharing, reactions, and language support to foster a rich chat experience between users. This would allow us to concentrate on delivering an engaging, useful, and safe platform for millions of customers across the country,” Otmazgin explains, “it’s about developing products that are core to your business, and to ensure that you’re always ahead of your competitors. We could either put years into building chat, but why do that if we can outperform our competition with a company like Sendbird? Stop developing products you can buy; only develop products that are core to your business.”

Results

With Yad2’s launch of chat, the team was immediately impressed with the level of customer support Sendbird could provide. “With full web native support, we started to see big changes and were able to utilize Sendbird very efficiently,” says Otmazgin. The Yad2 team felt at ease that if there was any needed support in production or questions that arose, Sendbird would deliver on Yad2’s strong expectations. Otmazgin continues, “with Sendbird, solving complex issues and challenges were made so much easier thanks to the support we received.”

Since first introducing chat to the platform, customers now have a much improved user experience versus previous, more manual forms of communication between buyers and sellers. “These days, it’s so much easier because users prefer to chat with each other. They have all their messages consolidated in one place and won’t forget anything because they can see their entire message history. It’s all organized by category,” states Otmazgin. Chat has allowed for a much faster, more casual interaction layer than Yad2’s solely phone call-centric past, particularly when “the message a user wants to send is short. Not needing to go through emails, SMS, WhatsApp, or other communication channels, but through real-time chat in Yad2 via Sendbird? It’s amazing.”

Furthermore, the privacy and security that Sendbird provides have been paramount for Yad2. Users no longer have to share their personal contact information with strangers, ensuring greater trust and safety in the marketplace platform, ultimately increasing retention rates.

Looking to the future, Yad2 seeks further to expand the business-to-business sector of its marketplace platform, focusing on large real estate, car dealers, and more, with Sendbird Chat moving in tandem every step of the way.