Looks like OLX website is crowded. For an outsider, that supposed to be a good thing, but going by the new changes introduced, it’s not. The classifieds website has announced that they are already getting classifieds overload by business sellers (B2C) while they prefer to have more consumer to consumer (C2C) sellers. This is in the electronics category. The problem, according to them is that business sellers flood the site with similar products on different accounts, this reducing visibility of individual sellers.
OLX deals with this by introducing a requirement for a business permit for business accounts in the elecronics category. This is already in place and the classifieds site reports that 40% of their electronics sellers have already submitted their business permits. Business sellers will also be limited to 13 adverts per week and 50 adverts per account on the higher side.
“Our platform is a predominantly consumer to consumer (C2C), with 80% C2C and 20% business to consumer (B2C). Businesses as we know, have a numerous items to sell and are very aggressive at selling on our platform. By letting them sell on our platform without permits, they would post as many similar item adverts under different business names and visibility for our C2C sellers tended to go down,” Said Peter Ndiang’ui, OLX Kenya Country Manager.
“We are now asking them to produce a business permit. We are not locking them out but putting measures to ensure balanced visibility of both B2C and C2C on our platform. The permit verification process will help us offer electronic items from different businesses for our buyers to choose from while giving C2C sellers who form a majority, fair share of visibility.” added Ndiang’ui.
I was on OLX selling laptop parts from my old laptop and OLX asked me for my business permit. I am an individual seller and shows that they are implementing policies that they have no way of enforcing. This marks the end of OLX’s popularity.
[…] months, OLX Kenya has long term plans, thus, discrediting any plans to shut down. For instance, it introduced a requirement that called for a permits for business accounts. The move capped ads for the said accounts over […]