OLX to charge a small fee to promote individual listing from FY16, says CEO Batra

As e-commerce takes wing in India, buying and selling of used goods online is also picking up pace. OLX calls itself India’s number one marketplace for buying and selling of used goods. That India is the largest market for this Brazil headquartered company is evident - from just 10 million page views in June 2011, it has grown to 1.7-1.8 billion page views per month now. [caption id=“attachment_2106511” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screengrab from olx[/caption] A growing Indian market has prompted OLX to now think in terms of monetizing the business by charging an individual listing fee from next fiscal. CEO Amarjit Singh Batra told Firstpost today that an individual listing charge would be introduced for the first time in India in FY16 if anyone wants his listing to be pushed to the top of the heap. He said this would be a very nominal amount, a flat fee depending on the product category and only applicable if an individual wants the listing promoted. Till now, OLX has not been charging any fee for listing old items and only uses advertising to generate revenues. Batra said the site only connects buyers of used products with sellers, it does not enable a transaction to be completed - each transaction is actually completed offline. The largest categories on OLX are mobile phones and automobiles. Automobiles (used cars and bikes largely) generate 850 million page views every month. But the site gets some rather interesting listings. For example, students sometimes come for selling their class notes and science projects on the site. Rural India has been buying and selling cattle on OLX. And often, people get their pets on the site. Batra said about 60% of the site’s listings come from tier I and metros and the remaining 40% comes from smaller towns and rural India. To a question on whether OLX has faced any regulatory headwinds like e-commerce giants Flipkart, Snapdeal or Amazon in India, Batra said these issues were not pertinent to OLX since no actual transactions happen on the site. According to a CRUST (Consumer Research on Used Goods and Selling Trends) Survey shared by OLX for 2014-15, the estimated size of the used goods market in India is Rs 56,200 crore. This is an estimate for 16 cities in urban India and has grown from last fiscal’s estimate of Rs 22,000 crore.