Carousell Case Study

Carousell marketplace increases transaction velocity through in-app chat

Carousell is one of the largest and fastest-growing classifieds marketplaces in Southeast Asia. It registers the highest time spent and engagement rate among all online marketplace players throughout Southeast 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.

Carousell's business communication challenge

Buyer-to-seller communication is a core part of Carousell’s marketplace. Carousell’s initial in-app communication was based on a commenting system. While this system connected the buyer and the seller, it couldn’t facilitate real-time communication like in a messenger. Consequently, users would leave the Carousell app for WhatsApp or iMessage.

 Carousell communication challenges included: 

1. The creation of a fragmented app experience where users had to toggle between the Carousell listing and their messenger apps. 
2. The impossibility of drawing users back to the app through real-time communication.
3. The data ownership and governance of the conversations happening outside the Carousell's app.
4. Trust and Safety. The team could not review why some transactions failed and whether users behaved unacceptably. 

Carousell communication requirements

To solve these challenges, Carousell needed to enable a world-class, real-time chat experience for their apps that could integrate quickly with complex business logic. It needed the chat experience to rival popular messengers like WhatsApp and iMessage and to ensure the trust and safety of users.  

The Solution to Carousell's buyer-to-seller communication challenge

Carousell chose Sendbird to power its in-app chat because of its reliable, secure, and scalable chat platform, already trusted by many digital leaders, such as Reddit, and its incredible engineering support. 

Carousell collaborated closely with Sendbird to implement a custom integration that addressed their unique and complex business logic.

Carousell created a high-quality chat experience with a feature-rich chat that included online presence, delivery receipts, read receipts, and typing indicators to keep engagement high, accelerate transaction velocity, and improve the customer experience.

Carousell also used Sendbird's moderation content tools, such as profanity filters, regular expression moderation, and shadow banning to remove slurs, Personal Identifying Information (PII), and bad actors from spamming users and creating community trust and safety issues. 

Carousel its marketplace user communication experience and improves business metrics

By choosing Sendbird and buying instead of building a chat experience, Carousell was able to accelerate time to market and reduce engineering costs. This allowed Carousell to focus its engineering resources on core marketplace features like discovery, onboarding, and more. 

With SendBird’s in-app messaging, Carousell:

• Created a native chat experience that was more secure, convenient, and useful.
• Increased transaction velocity from hours to minutes.
• Achieved 100% uptime of its messaging service allowing any commercial transaction to happen anytime.

Powered by AWS Cloud

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversation 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 efficiently automate the management of its servers in each region. 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.