Managing Marketplace Liquidity Across Categories & Markets At Yelp (Paul Chat Clip)

25 Sept 2021 · 2 min

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1:58

In this interview clip, a Yelp representative discusses the challenges of managing marketplace liquidity across the diverse home services categories. Despite Yelp’s overall size, the team dedicated to home services is relatively small, which adds complexity when handling varied job types—from emergency locksmith calls at night to custom home builds. Their strategy balances a holistic improvement of the overall experience with deep, targeted work on the top 5‑10% of high‑volume categories. They have begun a data‑driven approach, using extensive spreadsheets to evaluate whether each geography has sufficient traffic, quality businesses, and monetization. By ensuring all three pillars are met, they can prioritize product enhancements that make the experience easier for both consumers and service providers.

Chapters

They're kind of managing liquidity across various markets and having so many categories. So maybe how do you think about that as far as a marketplace?
Yeah, it's a challenge. It's a challenge, especially since relative to some of the more vertically focused marketplaces, we actually have a small team. I mean, people probably think of Yelp and think it's a massive company, and it is a pretty large company, but the number of people who are dedicated to home services is quite small. And the nuances between a lot of these home service categories are job types, if you will, is very different. Just to give an example here, if you are locked out of your home and you need a locksmith at 2:00 AM, that use case and that kind of workflow is very different than if you're building kind of a custom home up in the mountains. And so the approach that we're taking right now is trying to more or less raise all boats, where we're trying to kind of improve the experience kind of holistically. But then there are certain categories, higher volume categories, call it like the top 5% of categories or 10% of categories, where we're really trying to go deep and really kind of understand some of those nuances and cater the experience a little bit more towards the specifics of those categories. Maybe obvious, but another thing that we've started to look at more recently is kind of understanding liquidity across all cats and geos. There's massive, massive spreadsheets. We're effectively trying to understand, do we have enough traffic in all these geos? If we have enough traffic, do we have enough quality businesses? If we have enough quality businesses, are we monetizing enough of those quality businesses? And then if we have all 3, from there, how do we think about kind of pushing the experience to make it easier? So hopefully that answers your question.