If your marketplace is still using a simple SQL query like ORDER BY popularity DESC to rank your feeds or category pages, you are sitting on the single highest-leverage growth opportunity in your entire company. Here’s how to capture it in 5 simple steps.
The 2-Week Personalization Sprint
Step 1: Connect Your Data (< 1 hour) Your user and item data already lives in a data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) or an event stream (Segment). Instead of building complex pipelines, your engineer uses a pre-built connector to give a platform like Shaped secure, read-only access. No data migration. Just plug it in.
Step 2: Define Your Model in a Config File (< 1 Hour) Your PM or engineer doesn't need to know TensorFlow. They define the "recipe" for your ranking model in a simple YAML file. It's human-readable.
Step 3: Train & Deploy (Automated - a few hours) You commit the config file and hit "train." The platform handles the rest—provisioning the right servers, selecting the best algorithm for your data, training the model, and deploying it to a global, low-latency API endpoint. You get an email when it's done.
Step 4: Replace Your ORDER BY Clause (1-2 Days) This is the magic moment. Your backend engineer finds the code that powers your current feed. They remove the old, static ORDER BY logic and replace it with a single API call to your new endpoint. The API returns a perfectly sorted list of item IDs for that specific user. The engineering lift is minimal; it's just another REST API.
Step 5: A/B Test & Measure (Ongoing) You're live. You can now use your existing A/B testing tools to measure the impact of your new personalized sort against the old "trending" sort. Watch your engagement, conversion, and retention metrics climb.
That's it. What used to be an 18-month R&D project is now a simple, repeatable playbook. You don't need to hire a new team. You just need a better tool in your stack.
Want us to walk your engineering team through this playbook? Get in touch, and we can show them just how simple it is.
