Maximizing Solution Visibility with Machine Learning-Powered App Recommendations

We’re excited to announce the launch of our machine learning-powered App Recommendations!

Sellers often struggle to find the right third-party solution for their businesses. Our research has revealed that sellers not only lack awareness of the different solutions Square offers, but also want guidance in selecting the right solution tailored to their specific needs. To enhance our solution connection experience and maximize solution visibility to sellers, we built a ML infrastructure that powers personalized solution recommendations within the Seller Dashboard and App Marketplace. With the right recommendations in the appropriate context, sellers are able to seamlessly discover your solutions, thereby increasing solution conversion.

Why Machine Learning?

1. Higher conversion through high-quality recommendations. We can constantly improve the quality of recommendations and ultimately drive higher conversion by feeding in high quality seller attributes data & learning from how sellers connect to solutions. We felt the need to build a scalable way to showcase developer solutions to the right sellers, given the quantity of solutions in our ecosystem is rapidly growing.
2. Reach & personalization. We can expand recommendations to many contexts and surface areas that can reach a wide range of sellers for your solution.

How does it work?

We’ve built our infrastructure using a deep-neural network that consumes various seller features, such as the products they use, the nature of their business, and their adoption of specific solutions. Using this information, it generates a curated list of apps for each seller, ranked by a confidence score. To continuously enhance our recommendations, we regularly retrain the model based on seller adoption of the recommended solutions. While we’re still in the preliminary stages, our infrastructure has already demonstrated a significant increase in the quality & quantity of seller solution connections. We constantly monitor our recommendation results to identify potential biases, ensuring the highest quality solution connection experience. Every recommendation we provide is Square vetted, and developers can expect a constant improvement in conversion over time without extra effort or cost. We’re confident the expansion of this infrastructure to various placements will help provide your solution with more visibility to sellers.

Sample Appointments Recommendations

We have already launched App Recommendations in the Seller Dashboard Home & Appointments Home, and are excited to explore other surface areas to expand our seller reach.

Build with us

By leveraging machine learning and its transformative capabilities, our platform empowers our developers for success. With App Recommendations, we can surface the right solution to the right seller, enabling for seamless solution discovery and maximum conversion. To learn more about Square’s developer platform, visit https://squareup.com/developers or join our community at squ.re/slack.