Carousell Case Study

Carousell

Carousell is one of the largest and fastest growing classifieds marketplaces in South East Asia. Carousell registers the highest time spent and engagement rate across all online marketplace players throughout South East Asia. The company has featured 196 million listings and has successfully transacted over 71 million items. With its mobile-first focus, Carousell aims to make selling as easy as snapping a photo and buying as easy as chatting.

Business Challenge

Buyer to seller communication is a core part of Carousell’s marketplace. Before a buyer purchases an item, they connect with Carousell boasts highest engagement rate and increases transaction velocity with buyer-to-seller chat a seller in the application to show interest in the product and then commit to buying it. Communication about a listed item is the first engagement between the buyer and seller, when each party responds and completes the transaction. As a result, real-time communication is crucial to fast and successful transactions.

Carousell’s first in-app communication was based on a commenting system. While the commenting system connected the buyer and seller, it couldn’t facilitate the real-time communication that users became accustomed to in messenger apps. Many users connected on Carousell and immediately moved the conversation to messenger apps, like WhatsApp or iMessage, leaving Carousell out of the conversation.

This posed several challenges:

1. It created a fragmented app experience as users toggled between Carousell and their messenger apps without the context of either the conversation or product listing.
2. The app lost opportunities to draw users back because the conversation and its notifications were owned by the messenger apps.
3. Carousell’s Trust and Safety team could not follow up on failed transactions because the conversation existed in another application altogether. To solve these challenges, Carousell needed an in-app chat experience that could power real-time interactions between buyers and sellers, could flexibly integrate with its complex business logic, and quickly go to market with a great communication experience for its users.

Solution

Carousell chose SendBird to power its in-app chat because SendBird provides integration with complex products, great API flexibility, a fast time-to-market and superlative engineering support.

With SendBird, Carousell created a chat experience that connectedbuyers and sellers so they could transact more conveniently. Carousell’s chat allows users to discuss information about an item and allows them to complete a transaction by making or accepting an offer in the chat itself.

This required more than a technical integration. It required carefully weaving chat into Carousell’s business logic. In close partnership with SendBird’s engineering team, Carousell designed the architecture to integrate chat so that Carousell could own the business logic, and SendBird could manage the chat layer and payload.

With SendBird, Carousell upgraded its chat experience to enable crucial messaging features, like read-receipts and typing indicators, to always ensure that a user knows the buyer or seller’s level of engagement. Read-receipts, for example, play a pivotal role in the seller’s ability to qualify a buyer. Combining suggested messages with SendBird’s chat layer, Carousell is able to drive faster conversations and successful transactions, leading to much faster responses and a better experience.

By implementing a shadow block feature, SendBird also improved Carousell’s user safety. Shadow block allows chat moderators to isolate bad actors and block spamming without changes to the bad actor’s chat experience. Strategies offered by this and other features prevent users from circumventing important spam and safety features.

As a result of this engagement, Carousell’s engineering team no longer worries about safe and effective buyer to seller communication. Instead, it focuses on improving other critical areas of its product, like building better discovery or buying & selling experiences for its marketplace.

Results

With SendBird’s in-app messaging, Carousell has:

• Made the buying and selling experience as simple as chatting.
• Significantly reduced the transaction completion time from hours to minutes.
• 100% uptime for its messaging service, ensuring reliable realtime communication for every prospective buyer and seller interaction.

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWSnative services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.