Encuentra24 brings advertisers and buyers closer together by personalising the user experience with a combination of machine learning, Big Data and UX/UI improvements developed by Cuatroochenta to fulfil its motto: “If you publish it, you sell it!”

The client: Encuentra24, leader of classified ads

Encuentra24 is the leading online classified ads platform in Central America, with 2 million users in eight countries and both web and app formats. Headquartered in Panama, with a development office in Switzerland and contact centres in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Encuentra24 was founded in 2005 by Panamanian Wendy Jordan (COO) and Swiss Boris Métraux (CEO). It bases its business model on billing for ads ("plans") and highlights to give them greater visibility.

Cuatroochenta has been a technological partner of Encuentra24 since 2015, providing a service of continuous evolution of app and software development, Big Data strategy and definition of new solutions to consistently comply with its founding motto: "If you publish it, you sell it!"

Objectives

  • Continuous improvement of platform performance and results through applying advanced software
  • Process the information generated by the app to improve user service and increase profitability
  • Make the ad model and paid highlight options more functional in the app
  • Improve navigability and user experience

Solutions

  • New search engine integrating Elastic Search so that the results are more adjusted to the user's interests
  • Apply machine learning and Big Data algorithms to customise notifications
  • Artificial intelligence for image recognition
  • More effective ads, recommendations and notifications
  • New UI and UX design and functionalities: possibility of viewing images and videos in 360º, virtual reality in ads, searching by proximity to the user's location, and new verticals for real estate and cars to highlight the most visited categories
E24
App StorePlay Store

Big Data and UX/UI to personalise the experience in the app

The combination of Big Data, interface design (UI) and user experience (UX) has meant that the Encuentra24 app has become normalised among its wide community of users, with an average duration per session of more than 9 minutes and an excellent rating on both Google Play and the App Store. An increasingly personalised service has increased the platform's ad delivery, buyers, sales and revenue.

The technical improvements have been crystallised in successive updates to the application, the latest of which (version 4.16.2) has brought advertisers and buyers even closer through integrations that allow a more agile and comfortable buying and selling experience, always attending to users’ needs and their own use of the app.

Jon Lecertúa, the person in charge of development of the Encuentra24 app in Cuatroochenta, explains that, “one of the things most demanded by users was that the results obtained when a keyword is entered respond to what they really need, and that it is the reason why we introduced Elastic Search, which substantially improves the quality of the search.”

“Central America has everything in place to increase electronic commerce, because it is something that is easy to use, to measure, it only takes an efficient mail service to follow the increase exponentially; at this point, Encuentra24 will be there for that to happen.”
Boris Métraux, Cofounder and CEO of Encuentra24

Results

Annual visits to the web

Annual visits to the app

0
Total users in 2018

4.5 stars on Google Play with over 13,000 ratings

The Encuentra24 app has doubled the number of users in the last year and has an excellent rating from both buyers and sellers