Snapdeal launches personalised shopping guide Smartfeed, what's on offer?

Delhi-based Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, which runs the online marketplace Snapdeal.com has launched 'Smartfeed', a personal shopping guide for its customers. The new feature provides users with personalised shopping ideas and a trending list of products that are popular on the platform and relevant for the specific user.

The launch of the feature also marks the integration of Doozton.com- a curated and socially-nurtured fashion shop that was acquired by the company earlier this year for an undisclosed amount- with Snapdeal's existing recommendation and personalisation technologies. Smartfeed comprises of two personalised features– Shopping Ideas and Trending Now.

Shopping Ideas is a product discovery platform built on Hadoop and other Big Data technologies that the company claims is crunching over three billion data points daily for its over five million users. It considers all the interactions of the users across the catalog size and finally recommends over 1,000 products to the user based on their personalised interests, similar user classification, current purchase trends and future behaviour prediction.

Trending Now analyses user visits across the entire catalog in real-time and allows them to browse and shop for the most popular products on the platform across categories that are relevant for each specific user. According to the company, Smartfeed currently covers 20 per cent of Snapdeal's user base and the company plans to extend this feature to its entire user base within the next three months.

Ankit Khanna, SVP- product management at Snapdeal said, "Given the size of selection of products that Snapdeal offers, we believe the key lies in personalising the shopping experience online to match their experience in the offline store. Smartfeed has been launched in line with this."

Snapdeal was started as a pure online deals site and later it pivoted to a full-fledged horizontal e-commerce company via a marketplace model in September 2011. Last month, the company had secured $100 million (Rs 590 crore) in a fresh round of funding from a group of new investors including US-based BlackRock Financial Management, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek, Hong Kong-based Myriad Asset Management and Tybourne Capital Management, besides PremjiInvest, the personal investment vehicle of Wipro chairman Azim Premji.

The new funding came barely three months after the e-commerce player raised $133.77 million (Rs 830 crore) led by existing investor eBay Inc with participation from other existing investors Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Saama Capital, in the third-biggest funding round in an Indian tech firm. The latest round of funding brings Snapdeal's total fundraising to around $320 million.