Each month more than 11 million people–mostly 35- to 65-year-old women–visit Wayfair.com to browse its massive housewares catalog, an online directory hundreds of times larger than any Sears, Roebuck ever produced. Shipping is free for orders over $49; assembly is usually up to you. Wayfair doesn’t make anything. Many of its goods are produced by mom-and-pop operations, and the site will carry a product even if it sells it only once.
The key to this enterprise is a series of algorithms that fulfills orders–with a 98% success rate that’s improving all the time. Deployed to manage 7,000 vendors and a head-spinningly convoluted supply chain, that secret sauce makes shopping a virtually frictionless experience. Wayfair is as much a data miner as it is a retailer.
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