The Rise of Retail Marketplaces: Empowering Product Discovery for Shoppers

So you’re about to launch your marketplace - congratulations! You’re in good company; we’ve seen an increase in the number of retailers transitioning to a marketplace model, with large retailers like Next, B&Q and M&S all taking the plunge in the last few years. 

The formula is simple: the more products you offer, the more sales you can make. But this is only true if your shoppers can find what they’re looking for. So, how do you ensure great product discovery, even when your product catalogue has vastly increased? In this article, we explain how Hullabalook can help you achieve just that.

Upgrade your listings pages with Hullabalook technology, and watch your product discovery improve

As you’re fully aware, more products lead to more variants, which leads to more product grids and listings pages. Let’s say that I’m a DIY retailer, and I recently expanded my product range to include bedroom furniture. When I count up all the different variants on offer, I have 10,000 beds available to buy. A traditional listings page can fit around 50 products on a page, so if my shoppers choose not to use any filters, they’d have to sift through 200 pages to see all of my beds. 

Let’s say they do use a filter, for example click on a size or colour filter. In theory, this should help my shoppers find what they want to buy… the problem is that the quality of my data attribution isn’t great, so it’s very likely that the product they want to buy is hidden by incorrect tags.

So we find ourselves in a catch 22 - I want to sell more products, but I want my shoppers to find what they want to buy easily and quickly. 

What’s the solution? Hullabalook, of course!

Rather than taking a traditional approach, Hullabalook-powered AI Category Pages work more like a search engine. Whenever you interact with one of our pages, for example click on a filter, our technology re-ranks the page to feature the most relevant products first. We never filter out products, so shoppers are still exposed to the wider catalogue - they can just see the products they are most likely to buy at the top of the grid.

Hullabalook has the ability to handle large variants of products way more efficiently. For example, a lot of retailers selling sofas resort to showing one version of the product in the grid, because they don’t want to use up valuable space showing the same product, in different colours. But this is a frustrating UX, because shoppers can’t easily visualise the other variants on offer.

A Hullabalook-powered page works a little differently. See this Dunelm example below - shoppers have the option to click through all of the different colour variants available, without the need to click into the PDP. 

Hullabalook-powered pages are not constrained by product numbers 

Our ability to handle complicated product data is also far superior. In fact, it's our bread and butter - half of our team are data experts and hardcore software engineers. 

Hullabalook-powered AI Category Pages can handle up to 50,000 SKUs on a single page - without impacting page performance. We don’t make any external API calls, so our pages load and update instantly. We also require minimal manual data input from our retail customers. Let’s take colour for example - instead of manually tagging a product as ‘blue’, ‘green’ or ‘turquoise’, our technology is able to identify the exact HEX code of each product  (goodbye, inconsistencies), so when a shopper uses our colour band, they can choose specific shades and our technology will surface the most relevant products. 

Hullabalook’s platform is designed to help retailers of any size or industry. But if you’re a retailer in the midst of becoming a marketplace or expanding your product catalogue, our technology has the capability to supercharge your product discovery. Plus, we can be up and running on your site within a matter of weeks. 

Still need some convincing? Enter your details below and one of our data experts will be in touch.