Carousell launches Smart Listings

Singapore, 20 October 2017 – Our app launched with the simple premise of making selling a convenient and fast mobile-first experience: Snap, List and Sell in 30 seconds. At Carousell, we are always improving this experience to make it even faster and easier so that more people will be inspired to start selling their old belongings.

Globally, we now have over 95 million listings with 140 new ones being added every minute, as of 30 September 2017. We want to increase this number, and we’re going to do it with our new Carousell Smart Listings – a feature that helps you sell even faster and a key step towards the next generation of mobile classifieds.

Smart Listings and Smart Filters are significant updates to the selling and buying experience on Carousell, speeding up the process while also helping sellers create more detailed and effective listings. Together with Carousell Coins and Bumps, these features represent our commitment to helping our community declutter their lives more effectively.

Sell faster with Smart Listings

To speed up the selling process, we streamlined it to a series of taps and multiple-choice prompts to fill up the necessary details for a good listing.

The first step is still to snap or upload a photo, and select a category. Once the item’s category is selected, the rest of the prompts are dynamically generated to be specific to the item. For example, women’s fashion would prompt for type of clothing and size and other relevant details.

This is in contrast to the previous process of typing out all the details in a description box. The description box is still available for sellers to add further details and stories, but the key details can be entered via the new Smart Listing process.

An added benefit of the Smart Listing process is that users are now prompted for the key details that our research has shown to be necessary for an effective listing in specific categories. No longer will a user have to feel uncertain about which details to include when listing in a new category.

“Our users are always asking us to help them sell their items faster,” says Andrius Baranauskas, VP of Product. “With Smart Listings, we’re confident that our users will be able to create their listings faster, and with information that help buyers find them faster too. It all leads to an overall speedier sale.”

Putting “Smart” in the Smart Listings

Over the last six months, Carousell has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence and deep learning projects. AI as a technology has been around for a while now, and we think it has the potential to revolutionise the classifieds space.

We have been working on a number of AI projects to power our latest Smart Listings features. We are pleased to roll out the first of many AI features, category suggestions.

Our app will now intelligently scan your photo and suggest categories based on what we think your item is. Machine learning has made these suggestions very accurate and helpful.

We are committed to rolling out more AI-driven features to help users sell and list faster as well as to bring a more personalised browsing experience.

Search faster, Browse better

Users who mostly use Carousell for purchases will also benefit from this new development. Accompanying Smart Listings is Smart Filters, a new feature that takes advantage of the added fields to help users discover relevant listings faster.

If you were browsing for a dress to wear to a party, you could filter the women’s fashion category to view only tops in your size. Or if you’ve done your research and are set on getting a new car, you can filter Carousell’s Cars for Sale according to key criteria.

With 44 million different items available on the Carousell marketplace in Singapore alone, filters like these will greatly speed up the search process.

Buyers will find what they want faster, and sellers shouldn’t have to answer as many questions with the additional information available on the listings.

The revamped experience is available now

You can already try the new Smart Listings when you list items on the following categories:

• Women’s Fashion (Tops)
• Men’s Fashion (Footwear, Accessories, Watches, Bags & Wallet)
• Toys and Board Games (Toys)
• Cars (Cars for Sale)
• Property (HDB Rentals, Condo & EC Rentals)

More categories are being updated every week, and most of our popular categories will be updated progressively with the new Smart Listings and Filters.