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4Sale Achieves Remarkable 2023 Sales Volume Increases
The Kuwaiti online classifieds platform is now focused on hyper-personalization and infrastructure upgrades amid ambitious plans for 2024.
4Sale, Kuwait’s prominent online classifieds platform, has announced its exceptional growth in 2023, along with heightened activity across all of its 197 categories. The ongoing trend of consumers shifting towards online transactions rather than cash payments has continued to flourish, with over 90% of the company’s sales occurring online in 2023, a significant increase from the 65% recorded in 2019.
2024 should see continued growth for the classifieds platform as the company focuses on refining and enhancing its search capabilities. A major strategic endeavor will involve the implementation of hyper-personalized recommendations for customers, enabling the optimization of strategies for holidays and major commercial events. To achieve this, 4Sale will employ data collection and analysis techniques similar to those of Google and Facebook.
Furthermore, this year will see a significant upscaling of the company’s infrastructure to accommodate its rapid growth trajectory. The goal is to reach two million monthly active users by 2025, a substantial market share in a country of just five million people.
Tarek Sakr, Chief Executive Officer of 4Sale, expressed his enthusiasm for the outstanding 2023 performance and emphasized the company’s ambitions to enhance customer experiences in the coming year. “While a market leader, 4Sale’s ambition remains undimmed; we want everything we do to be bigger and faster, easier and more personalized for customers, with maximum choice […] I look forward to next year with confidence and excitement”.
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Meanwhile, Nabil Mohamed, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer of 4Sale, highlighted the company’s commitment to hyper-personalization and technological advancements that aim to transform sporadic purchases into daily habits. “We are committed to delivering an enhanced user experience and embracing technological advancements for the benefit of our users. Our goal is to offer highly relevant recommendations and truly beneficial features”.
As part of the ongoing infrastructure upgrades, 4Sale is investing in more efficient technologies to streamline website and backend operations in a bid to enhance performance and data-handling capabilities.
News
Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch
The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.
Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.
Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.
Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests
Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.
