Creating Better Marketplace Experiences Through Data

At SMG, our marketplaces are built to help people make important decisions: finding a new home, buying or selling a car, discovering services, or connecting with the right buyer or seller. In all of these moments, users expect relevance, simplicity and trust. Data plays an important role in making that possible.

Data helps us understand what users are looking for and how we can improve their experience. It allows us to make search results more relevant, recommend listings that better match user needs, reduce friction in the journey and connect buyers and sellers more effectively. It also supports important safeguards, such as fraud detection, platform security and improvements that make our marketplaces easier and safer to use.

But the key word is responsibility. As our Head of Data Privacy emphasises, data should never be collected “just in case”. It should serve a clear purpose, create value for users and be handled with the right safeguards. When this is done well, data improves the marketplace experience without becoming intrusive.

This balance is especially important when it comes to personalisation. Many users appreciate recommendations that reflect their search criteria, saved preferences or previous interactions. At the same time, they rightly expect control over their personal information. The line is crossed when personalisation stops feeling helpful and starts feeling invasive, unexpected or difficult to manage.

For SMG, good personalisation should feel useful, not unsettling. That means applying principles such as data minimisation, clear user information, meaningful choices and appropriate consent where required. Before using data, we ask whether the purpose is understandable, proportionate and genuinely beneficial for the user. We also consider whether users can influence or manage how their information is used.

This approach is part of what we mean by privacy by design. Privacy is not something that should be added at the end of a project as a compliance check. It needs to be considered from the very beginning, when new products, features and services are being developed.

In practice, this means looking carefully at what data is needed, why it is needed, how long it should be kept, who can access it, how it is protected and how users are informed. It also means challenging assumptions. Do we really need a specific data point? Can we achieve the same goal with less data? Can information be aggregated, anonymised or pseudonymised?

For us the concept of privacy by design is embedded into the way we work. We train product and engineering teams specifically on privacy by design and have appointed dedicated champions across our teams. This helps ensure that privacy considerations are part of everyday product and technology decisions, rather than a separate or last-minute topic.

It is not about slowing innovation down. It is about building products that are sustainable, trustworthy and aligned with user expectations.

There are common misconceptions about how marketplace platforms use data. One is the idea that platforms always want as much personal data as possible. In reality, responsible companies have a strong interest in using only the data that is necessary and meaningful. More data is not automatically better data.

Another misconception is that all personalisation is the same as tracking. Relevance can be improved in different ways, including through user-provided preferences, contextual information or aggregated insights, without relying on extensive individual profiling. Users may also worry that their data is used in ways they cannot see or influence. This is why transparency and control are essential.

As our Head of Data Privacy notes, data protection should not be viewed as separate from the marketplace experience. It is a fundamental part of creating a safe, reliable and trusted environment for everyone who uses our platforms.

Transparency is one of the foundations of trust. Users should not need to be legal experts to understand how their data is handled. They should be able to see what data is collected, why it is collected, how it supports the service, whether it is shared and how they can manage their preferences or exercise their rights.

For companies, transparency also creates discipline. If we cannot clearly explain why certain data is used, that is a signal to reassess whether the use is justified. Trust is built when users feel respected. That means avoiding surprises, communicating in plain language and offering real choices where choices are expected or legally required.

Looking ahead, data will continue to shape the future of marketplaces. Technologies such as AI, automation and advanced analytics can help create more relevant, efficient and secure user experiences. But innovation and privacy are not opposites. In fact, privacy is a condition for sustainable innovation.

As these technologies evolve, SMG believes the future use of data should be guided by clear principles: purpose limitation, fairness, accountability, transparency, security, data minimisation and human oversight where appropriate. We need to be especially thoughtful when technologies influence what users see, how offers are ranked or how risks are assessed. These systems should be designed responsibly, tested carefully and monitored over time.

The future of data-driven marketplaces should not be about using every piece of data simply because technology allows it. It should be about using data in ways that are useful, proportionate, explainable and respectful.

For SMG, the goal is clear: to create better marketplace experiences while maintaining the trust of the people who use our platforms every day. Privacy is not a barrier to that goal. It is one of the ways we achieve it.

By combining innovation with responsibility, we can continue to deliver experiences that are relevant, efficient and valuable while ensuring that users remain in control of their information and confident in how it is handled.