[VIDEO] How classifieds marketplace Carousell found itself on 1 in 4 mobile devices in Singapore.
Marketplaces account for over 50% of all e-commerce today. To remove any doubt that this is a flash in the pan, in Amazon’s most recent annual report, Jeff Bezos reported that over 2 million sellers now have listings within its marketplace.
Kahuna customer Carousell, the largest classifieds marketplace in Singapore and Hong Kong started humble, focusing on cash-strapped students looking to get some money back on used textbooks. Today, 1 in 4 devices in Singapore have Carousell installed. The service currently provides 100 million listings across the markets they operate in which include Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia and Australia.
Classifieds are seller focused marketplaces. For these kinds of businesses, it’s all about getting the seller to list, and to list again and reach a point where they innately know that product moves on your property. “The magic moment”, as Carousell calls it, is to experience a sale of a used item that was otherwise considered a sunk cost, for the first time. That becomes a dinner table conversation and leads to more sellers, it turns sellers into buyers, and it finally gets what’s called the flywheel to move faster and faster and ultimately creating a high margin business with extreme velocity.
Arun Kumar heads up acquisition and growth at Carousell. There’s much more in the video but here are some great lessons learned that he shares with Kahuna’s Malcolm Friedberg:
- Every marketplace is in a land grab right now to become its country’s Uber, Airbnb, Expedia, Craigslist, Indeed, Etsy and another 100 verticalized offerings. That takes a balance between going for growth and also showing that there is money to be made. Arun explains how classifieds manage this delicate dance. Their growth comes from consumer to consumer transactions but monetization comes from business to consumer products.
- International expansion requires learning local nuances but doubling down on the seller experience to drive growth and differentiation. This comes from always optimizing the customer journey and using machine learning to add speed and ease at every turn.
- Root density (availability of buyers and sellers in within a needed geographic radius to make a transaction happen) is super important for classifieds to drive liquidity. Stale inventory is your worst nightmare. Countries that have sparse population across different cities vs more dense areas such as New York or Hong Kong require very different acquisition and re-listing playbooks.
- The original value proposition was “snap, list, sell in 30 seconds”. The goal now is to keep the same process but shorten that time frame to 3 seconds. Yes, 3.
MarketplaceConnect – Carousell from Kahuna on Vimeo.
Carousell just announced a whopping $85 million in funding today. Yet, as CEO Siu Rui says,
“We always say that we are less than 1% done.”
You can feel the energy and focus in Arun’s voice and words, and it’s clear that their work is not done.
Jon Russell has some more nuggets about their fantastic business. And more coverage here, on Techmeme.
Seven of the #1 regional marketplaces across the globe use Kahuna. We’re privileged to serve Carousell and other iconic marketplaces across the globe. And we plan to highlight and celebrate their amazing stories. This is the first of a video series that you will find on the Kahuna blog.
Go team Carousell.
