Kidizen integrates promoted listings into their growing kidstuff marketplace

What Kidizen Wanted

Kidizen is the peer-to-peer marketplace for pre-loved kidstuff. They help parents keep up with their kids' changing needs by providing a platform through which they can shop and sell a curated selection – all within a trustworthy parent community.

As they grew, Kidizen wanted to monetize with sponsored listings, whereby their sellers could pay for additional visibility across the site and app. Such ads are substantial revenue drivers for other marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Instacart, and more.

As a lean team with fewer than 15 employees, though, they didn’t have the resources to build such a platform themselves, and no traditional ad server offered the flexibility they needed.

So Kidizen turned to Kevel’s ad APIs to quickly build out this ad product. In much less time than building from scratch, they add promoted listings to their site/app, and they accelerated advertiser adoption via a self-serve opt-in tab within their sellers portal.

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Kidizen’s promoted listings are relevant and blend in

As users browse, Kidizen now displays relevant promoted listings within their standard results. These are real product listings, and sellers are paying extra for this visibility, with the expectation that appearing higher up in the list will drive more sales.

When sellers opt-into the ad program, Kidizen handles the targeting on the backend, based on internal tagging around brand, size, category, and so on. This ensures users see promotions they are likely to be interested in.

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"We’re happy we went with Kevel. Even though ads were new to us, their support and tech enabled us to launch this platform quickly, and it’s already started to pay dividends."

– Dori Graff, CEO and Co-founder

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Kidizen’s self-serve ad portal makes it easy for sellers to opt-in

Kidizen makes it simple for sellers to promote their items via a tab in their vendor portal, which asks for budget goals and credit card info.

This self-serve option is enabled by Kevel’s Management and Reporting APIs: when a seller opts-in, Kidizen sends an automated API request to create those ads within Kevel and launch the campaigns immediately.

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Sponsored listings provide an ongoing, low-maintenance revenue stream

Given Kidizen has automated the creation and management of these sponsored listings, they haven’t needed to invest in a large sales or ad operations team — which means the effort to maintain their ad platform is minimal.

Even better, since it’s all automated, as they adopt new advertisers and grow site traffic, their revenue will increase without much incremental work, thus turning this into an ongoing, scalable, low-maintenance revenue stream.

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Kidizen serves these promotions across both their website and app

While their original in-house solution had some targeting capabilities, Kidizen can now more quickly add additional targeting logic to customize the content each user sees.

Better targeting means more relevant call-to-actions, which increases the effectiveness and click-through rates of in-product marketing.

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"We view our ad product as a win-win-win. Sellers like the extra visibility, users see unobtrusive and relevant promotions, and we drive extra revenue every month."

–Dori Graff, CEO and Co-founder