Kahuna unveils the first-ever Cloud for Marketplaces platform

Kahuna has unveiled the first-ever cloud service created specifically for marketplace businesses, the company announced Thursday.

The company previously focused on delivering mobile buyer insights gleaned through artificial intelligence (AI) but made a shift about a year ago to go all-in on insights and solutions to support the burgeoning marketplace space, which includes services like Airbnb and Uber.

A 2107 Forrester report says that marketplaces are taking a growing share of business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail sales and that half of online retail spending came from marketplaces in 2016.

Kahuna uses AI to provide marketplaces with what it calls a “holistic infrastructure program” that provides key insights in three distinct areas: buyer marketing, seller optimization and marketplace vibrancy.

Sameer Patel, chief executive officer of Kahuna, told me that marketplaces face different problems than retail businesses and required a solution that was more complex than “old-school marketing software.”

From a release announcing the news:

Kahuna’s platform uses artificial intelligence to help marketplaces solve challenges such as reducing cognitive overload for buyers, optimizing message copy and subject lines, minimizing shopping cart abandonment, triggering real time action to close transactions, keeping buyers and sellers negotiating, facilitating paid placement and promotions, accelerating purchase frequency and order values, optimizing buyer to seller ratios, and determining the best communication, device, channel and time that drives liquidity.

Image of the Kahuna user dashboard

The vertical solution is integrated into platforms sellers are already using to manage their ecommerce processes, such as Oracle/Responsys and Magento Commerce. Users can collect and analyze a wide variety of data points, including buyer growth, buyer/seller ratio and platform leakage, where buyers and sellers continue their relationship offline.

Patel says the marketplaces are one of the fastest growing areas in ecommerce.

“Today the most modern form of commerce is not manufacturer or warehouse to consumer but rather, millions of sellers to millions of buyers, represented by marketplaces in almost every category, amounting to more than $500 billion in commerce,” Patel said in the release. “Kahuna has built a modern operating system for this underserved but fastest growing segment of ecommerce by providing technology to connect the right sellers with the right buyers and to get the flywheel constantly moving to generate liquidity. No other platform is intently focused on serving this market.”