Transforming India’s Resale Culture With an AI-Powered Marketplace Experience

1. About the Company

SoleSearch is India’s leading digital platform for reselling hyped and limited-edition products, from coveted sneakers to luxury collectibles. Based in Mumbai, the company identified a growing demand among India’s younger, style-conscious consumers for a trusted, seamless marketplace where they could buy, bid on, and sell authenticated products. With a lean team of under ten, SoleSearch set out to build a mobile-first experience that could rival global resale platforms while being deeply attuned to the preferences and behaviours of the Indian market.

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2. The Challenge

As SoleSearch scaled its platform and expanded its product catalogue, several critical product and experience challenges surfaced:

• A Generic Shopping Experience in a Taste-Driven Market: Users struggled to discover products that matched their individual style preferences, sizes, and tastes. The absence of personalization meant the platform felt transactional rather than curated, leading to lower engagement and missed conversion opportunities in a category where personal expression is everything.
• A Confusing Dual Marketplace Model: SoleSearch offered both outright purchases and a bidding mechanism for select products. However, the coexistence of these two modes within a single interface created confusion. Users lacked a clear, intuitive way to distinguish between buying and bidding, resulting in friction that contributed to cart abandonment and a fragmented user experience.
• A Cumbersome Seller Onboarding Process: The process for uploading and getting products verified was overly complex, discouraging potential sellers from listing their items. For a marketplace that depends on a healthy supply of authenticated inventory, this friction on the seller side posed a direct threat to platform growth and liquidity.
• Low Community Engagement and Retention: Beyond transactions, SoleSearch lacked the community layer that drives long-term retention in lifestyle and culture-driven platforms. Without features that fostered a sense of belonging, competition, or shared identity, user engagement dipped between purchases and retention remained a persistent challenge.

These challenges required a blend of product strategy, UX design, and intelligent personalisation to transform SoleSearch from a functional marketplace into a destination platform.

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3. Solution Implemented by Tequity

Tequity partnered with SoleSearch as its product design and experience team, working across research, UX, and AI-driven personalisation to reshape the platform from the ground up.

• Built an AI-Powered Personalisation Engine: Tequity conducted in-depth user research to understand the specific preferences and behaviours of SoleSearch’s target audience. Based on these insights, an intelligent user profiling system was designed that captures taste through interactive quizzes, style preference sliders, and image-based selections. This was paired with an engaging onboarding experience that encourages users to share their individual preferences from the very first interaction. Machine learning algorithms were then implemented to continuously refine product recommendations based on evolving user feedback and behaviour, delivering a shopping experience that feels curated rather than generic.
• Designed an Intuitive Buy-Bid Dual Interface: Tequity identified the specific pain points users faced when navigating between buying and bidding modes. A strategically placed toggle was designed, allowing users to switch effortlessly between the two functionalities. The app’s interface dynamically adapts to the selected mode: a sleek light theme for outright purchasing and a sophisticated dark theme for bidding, providing clear, immediate visual cues. This approach eliminated ambiguity and gave users full confidence in the action they were taking at any given moment.
• Streamlined the Seller Listing and Verification Flow: Tequity redesigned the entire seller journey into a simple, guided interface that enables users to snap pictures of their sneakers or luxury items and upload them directly within the app. Each listed product then passes through a swift yet thorough verification process to ensure authenticity and quality. This transparency instils confidence in buyers while lowering the barrier for sellers, encouraging greater participation and maintaining the marketplace’s integrity.
• Introduced a Gamification and Community Layer: Tequity identified the critical touchpoints where user engagement dipped and mapped the challenges preventing the platform from fostering a genuine sense of community. A gamification strategy was designed around weekly challenges that encourage participation, healthy competition, and knowledge sharing. As users complete challenges, they earn SoleCoins, an in-app currency that unlocks exclusive rewards such as early access to limited editions and premium discounts, transforming passive browsers into active, invested community members.

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4. Results

The partnership between SoleSearch and Tequity delivered measurable outcomes across every dimension of the platform experience:

• The AI-powered personalisation engine and redesigned onboarding flow drove a 50% increase in conversion rate, confirming that a curated, taste-driven experience directly translates into purchase decisions.
• The intuitive buy-bid toggle and dynamic visual mode switching resulted in a 60% reduction in cart abandonment, eliminating a major source of friction and giving users the clarity they needed to transact with confidence.
• The streamlined listing and verification process lifted the seller retention rate to 70%, significantly strengthening the supply side of the marketplace and reinforcing trust across both buyers and sellers.
• The gamification and community features increased average weekly time on app to 40 minutes, a strong signal that SoleSearch has evolved beyond a transactional marketplace into an engaged, community-driven platform.
• Building on this foundation, SoleSearch is now well-positioned to expand its product categories, deepen its AI-driven personalisation, and cement its place as India’s definitive destination for limited-edition culture.

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