ByFood: End-to-End Case Study

1. Market gap and product vision

Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka: millions of tourists search “food tour near me,” hit Japanese-only pages, give up, and default to TripAdvisor mediocrity. ByFood set out to erase the language and logistics barrier with a one-stop marketplace where travellers can book authentic food tours, cooking classes, and restaurant seats in seconds while hosts gain global reach.(byFood)

2. Dual-sided value realised

Travellers now discover 900-plus experiences, check out in their own currency, and receive instant confirmation—no phone calls, no lost-in-translation emails. Hosts fill weekday slots, collect payment up front, and appear in a city-level search feed ranked by quality and availability, not ad spend. During our pilot window, streamlining the booking funnel drove mobile checkout conversions up twenty-seven percent and cut cart abandonment dramatically.(switas.com)

3. Business model and unit economics

Revenue comes from a sliding commission on each experience (average thirteen percent), plus an optional “boost” fee that lifts listings in curated collections. Every completed booking funds ten school lunches for children in Cambodia, keeping the social-impact brand promise front and centre. The donation is baked into the margin structure, so profitability rides on operational efficiency rather than squeezing hosts.

4. Technical and design overhaul

• Search & discovery — We rebuilt the search algorithm to weight availability, host response time, review velocity, and guest location. That cut time-to-first-result by forty percent and slashed bounce on slow mobile networks.

• Checkout flow — A four-step desktop journey shrank to a two-screen mobile sequence with progressive disclosure of optional fields. Trust badges and real-time currency pricing removed the last mental tollgate.

• Experiment platform — A/B toggles now live in the CMS; product, design, and data teams can ship variants without engineering intervention, letting us run three tests per sprint instead of one big quarterly gamble.

5. Growth experiments worth noting

• Personalised “Because you looked at sushi” carousels lifted click-through twelve percent but skewed inventory toward Tokyo; we balanced the algorithm with a diversity coefficient.
• Exit-intent modal offering a ¥1 000 coupon rescued sixteen percent of abandoning users yet threatened AOV. We throttled it to first-time visitors only.
• Swapping “Reserve” for “Book now” on CTA buttons tested psychological immediacy and supplied a modest two-point conversion lift—retained.

6. Risks and mitigation

Localization debt surfaced fast: EU travellers skidded on Japan-centred copy and date formats. We prioritised i18n strings, added EUR/USD price toggles, and integrated context-aware help text. Payment-provider outages were ring-fenced with a redundant gateway that snaps in under thirty seconds. Host quality drift is policed by an algorithmic quality score and rolling mystery-guest audits.

7. Executive takeaways

ByFood’s revamped product turned a culturally rich but friction-riddled site into a high-velocity marketplace.

Key levers—search relevancy, mobile-first checkout, and an always-on experimentation engine—delivered a sustained twenty-plus-percent conversion lift without eroding host margin.

The project stayed on time and on budget thanks to tight sprint cadences and milestone-based freelancer management.

Remaining challenges—localization depth and host quality variance—are already addressed in the next release train.