District by ShopRunner features a dynamic real-time feed that presents a shopper with trending products tailored to each user based on her past actions, as well as information she's shared with the app.

ShopRunner has quietly launched District by ShopRunner, a mobile app-based online marketplace.

The marketplace, which features mass market items from about 140 retailers, features a dynamic real-time feed that presents a shopper with trending products tailored to each user based on her past actions, as well as information she’s shared with the app. She also can explore her “favorite” retailers within the app, which make up her personalized shopping “district.” Like ShopRunner, District offers shoppers free two-day shipping and free returns.

When a consumer downloads the District by ShopRunner app, the marketplace asks her a series of questions, such as “What department do you shop the most” and “How young are you,” before asking her to “Build her district” by selecting her favorite stores.

ShopRunner, which is primarily known for its two-day shipping service, believes District will stand out from other marketplaces because it features a number of high-profile brands with which ShopRunner already works—including Neiman Marcus, No. 43 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top 500, Burberry, No. 475, and Harry & David, No. 66—and it aims to use information it knows about the shopper to present her with curated products within the app.

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“Many marketplaces struggle because they lack a clear value proposition, and they don’t have a clear way to acquire customers, which makes it difficult to scale,” ShopRunner CEO Sam Yagan recently told Internet Retailer. District is different, he says, because it leverages the relationships ShopRunner has with the 3 million consumers who have used its service in the past year. The vast majority of those active users have their payment card information stored with ShopRunner because they access the company’s service for free via relationships that ShopRunner has with American Express, MasterCard and PayPal (only a small number of consumers pay a $79 annual fee to get access to ShopRunner’s service).

The launch of an online marketplace comes only a month after ShopRunner bought Spring, an online marketplace that features 1,500 brands and more than 200,000 SKUs on its platform.

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