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 daily, users can find various second-hand goods, from real estate to cars, home goods, and 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 several 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 or video call. If interested in something, they can see it clearly in the marketplace and immediately reach out to the seller using chat. Chat is not complex for the user, 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 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 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 and the necessary maintenance and uptime to ensure proper performance, outsourcing to a chat third-party vendor was a quick and easy decision.

Yad2’s mission has been to develop the best marketplace available in Israel continually, 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 chat features 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 core products for your business and ensuring you’re always ahead of your competitors. We could put years into building chat, but why do that if we can outperform our competition with a chat solution like Sendbird's? Stop developing products you can buy; only develop products that are core to your business.”

Results

With Yad2’s chat launch, the team was immediately impressed with the customer support Sendbird could provide. “With full web native chat 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 any needed support in production or questions arose, Sendbird would deliver on Yad2’s strong expectations. 

Otmazgin continues, “With Sendbird, solving complex issues and challenges was made so much easier thanks to the support we received.”

Since first introducing chat to the marketplace, customers now have a much improved user experience versus the previous, with more manual communication between buyers and sellers. “These days, it’s so much easier because users prefer to chat with each other. They consolidate all their messages 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. We do not need 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 and increasing retention rates.

Looking to the future, Yad2 seeks further to expand the business-to-business communication 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.