Here’s how Snapdeal is using technology to weed out sellers with low product quality

Snapdeal says it has refined the rating mechanism to ensure correct sellers with products that are highly rated by the consumers are more likely to have greater visibility.

Snapdeal deploys data analytics based tech tool (Reuters)

Snapdeal said it is now using technology, data analytics in particular, to ensure that sellers with genuine products and good customer ratings find more relevance on the platform.

As the ecommerce market in India grows, so does the issue of marketplaces' ability to ensure authenticity of products on their platforms. There have been multiple incidents of sellers trying to game the system to get higher ratings.

Each buyer on Snapdeal can rate their purchases, rating them between 1-5 stars. The rating for each product, along with the number of users who have rated the product is displayed to all users on the marketplace.

Snapdeal says it has set up a new mechanism to ensure correct sellers with products that are highly rated by the consumers are more likely to have greater visibility in the search results, which mostly leads to more sales for such sellers vis-à-vis other sellers.

The platform systemically reduces the visibility of the sellers selling products with poor ratings and removes the sellers from the platform on account of repeated performance issues and violations of platform terms and conditions.

"The ratings and reviews by millions of Snapdeal buyers is the most powerful and authentic way of guiding users on the marketplace platform. Such ratings help buyers browse, assess and decide between various product-price options available on the platform. A direct linkage between current performance and future business prospects aligns the interests of buyers, sellers and the platform", a Snapdeal spokesperson told Hindustan Times.

Nearly 12 million listings on Snapdeal received customer ratings in the last 8 months. With this data-driven exercise, Snapdeal is looking at highlighting high-quality sellers and is also based on customer ratings, looking at weeding out low-quality sellers, including those who misuse the platform to sell counterfeit goods, added the spokesperson.