Launched new AI marketplace listing feature to more than 20 million users in just 2 months
By leveraging AI, users can create a marketplace listing in as little as 15 seconds instead of the 5-10 minutes it previously took
Mercari uses Google Cloud and Weights & Biases to enhance their platform with AI, improve user experience, and scale operations.
Mercari uses Google Cloud and Weights & Biases to enhance their platform with AI, improve user experience, and scale operations.
Improving the user experience
Mercari’s mission is to circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in people around the world. At the heart of the company is its C2C marketplace with more than 20 million monthly active users. To fulfill their mission, they want to make the buying and selling experience for these users as easy and seamless as possible. They believe that AI is one of the key tools that will allow them to do this more effectively and efficiently in the future.
To have a thriving marketplace, Mercari believes that two things are important: a really easy listing experience to maximize the number of high quality listings on the platform and an optimized search and discovery process to allow potential buyers to find the items that they're looking for, or even items that they didn't know they were looking for. AI allows them to tackle both of these and help them deliver an entirely new experience.
Customer experience is at the heart of what we are doing and what we care about. One in five people in Japan use our service on a monthly basis. Gen AI allows us to bring entirely new experiences to these users. And, building on top of Google Cloud gives us the confidence that these experiences will work as expected at the scale we need them to work.
Max Frenzel
Head of AI/LLM, Mercari
AI marketplace listing support
One of the biggest challenges for Mercari users was the listing process that often caused friction for sellers. Creating the title and description is a tedious process, and listers who don't list very often don't know what a good listing looks like or have the confidence to craft a compelling one.
Mercari delivered AI listing support to solve this problem. Now, instead of taking a lot of time to research and write the title and the description, users can take a few pictures of the item and have AI automatically create a suitable title and description. Users can list their item in about 15 seconds, which would have taken at least five to ten minutes before.
Bringing this AI support feature to their 20 million plus monthly active users was enabled by Google Cloud and Weights & Biases tools and services, which allowed Mercari to optimize this experience for their users.
Mercari used Weights & Biases Weave to identify and evaluate several approaches that helped the company arrive at its final feature through rapid communication across engineering, product, and leadership, ensuring confident, impactful changes and accelerating prototype-to-launch cycles.
Google Cloud and Weights & Biases allowed us to drastically transform our user experience on the listing and buying side, bringing the time to list down from minutes to literally seconds, and allowing buyers to find items just from a single photo within literally a second.
Max Frenzel
Head of AI/LLM, Mercari
Optimizing image search
Together with Google Cloud and Weights & Biases, we're completely transforming how the buying and selling experiences on our Mercari marketplace work. We're using AI to allow users to sell much faster and easier by listing the items they want to sell in a matter of just a few seconds. Similarly, the buying experience allows users to discover items in completely new and previously unseen ways. And all of this has been enabled in large part by Google Cloud and Weights & Biases.
Max Frenzel
Head of AI/LLM, Mercari
Mercari relies on a number of different Google Cloud solutions from Google Kubernetes Engine, which runs a lot of their infrastructure, to Vertex AI, which powers their Vector Search and enables image search and other functionalities.
High quality search and discovery are key to Mercari’s marketplace as they allow users to find the items that they want to purchase. Image search was one of the first steps in taking AI-enabled search to the next level. In many cases, people know what they're looking for and they know the right keywords, but sometimes they don't. Image search allows them to take a picture of something they like or something they found online and find items that look similar.
Also, sellers are using image search to do price research for the items they want to list. In the first few months of launching image-enabled search, Mercari has seen millions of searches and tens of thousands of transactions as a direct result of this image search feature.
Ultimately, Mercari leveraged AI to enhance both listing and buying experiences, marking just the beginning of AI's impact on its marketplace.
Mercari is an online marketplace that facilitates the buying and selling of a wide range of new and used items between consumers. It provides a platform for users to easily list, discover, and purchase products from their mobile devices or computers.
Industry: Retail
Location: Japan
Products: Google Kubernetes Engine, Vertex AI, BigQuery, Cloud Load Balancing
About Google Cloud partner — Weights & Biases
Weights & Biases is an AI Developer Platform that helps users track and visualize machine learning experiments. It provides tools to optimize hyperparameters, share models and datasets, and evaluate gen AI applications.