Customer Ratings to Play a Larger Role in Sellers' Sales on Snapdeal

• 12 million listings receive customer ratings in the last 8 months

• Higher quality sellers to gain ahead of the festive season

• Low quality, counterfeit goods face the axe

Snapdeal - India's leading value-focused online marketplace - is using data analytics to link the business prospects of sellers on its platform with the way buyers rates the products sold by the sellers.

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.

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--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.

Commenting on the move, Snapdeal said, "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."

To prevent any misuse of the rating process, only buyers who have purchased a product can do a rating and only one rating is permitted per purchase.

Since the rating process also captures the number of buyers who have rated the product, it also serves as a valuable guide towards the bestsellers, which is useful for new buyers and is an important reference point in the purchase of unbranded goods.

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

Snapdeal is among India's top 3 largest e-commerce marketplace. More than 70 million users visit Snapdeal every month to browse and buy from amongst the 200 million listings by more than 5,00,000 registered sellers on the marketplace. Snapdeal's focus on the unbranded segment has vastly expanded the options for both the buyers and sellers. Customers get a deep choice of affordable goods online, better than the choices available offline. The sellers also gain immensely by selling to a much larger nationwide audience, which is beyond the reach of their physical bazaars.