OLX, one of the leading online classifieds website in India, has today announced a series of industry-first, tech-led changes with the launch of its new OLX App. The new app is aimed at increasing the penetration of online classifieds across regions, age-groups, and categories.
The new mobile application from the company will start rolling out to the OLX’s Android users on October 27th. For remaining users, the new app will be rolled out in the coming weeks. It claims to have leveraged innovative tech and deep consumer understanding to roll out improved and forward-looking product changes. This move is aimed towards making customer experience safer, simpler, and social.
OLX App is expected to fulfill the unmet consumer needs. While the company is already leading in categories like used cars, bikes, mobiles phones, furniture, and electronics, it is now looking to give scale to other categories with the help of these changes.
Pre-owned fashion products and accessories, as well as hobby items such as musical instruments, sports equipment, collectibles, and vintage items have steadily been growing on OLX. The new app will facilitate further growth for these under-penetrated categories. OLX expects to double its growth rate as a result of these changes in the next one year.
The four major pillars for the new app include — Registered Users Only, Snap and Post, Chat First and Hyper Local Experience. To make the platform more secure, OLX has made it mandatory for all users – sellers and buyers – to register for accessing the platform.
With the new OLX App, it has reduced the Ad posting time by more than 50 percent with the introduction of image recognition technology. The image recognition technology allows users to post an Ad in as less as 10 seconds.
In order to protect user privacy and to make the platform safer, the default settings of the new OLX App do not reveal the phone number of the seller. OLX Chat is the only way to get in touch with the sellers until they decide to reveal their phone number.
Further, the hyper-local experience has been introduced to allow users to find great products in their vicinity. This particularly helps facilitate transactions for low-value items in the under-penetrated categories.
Along with introducing new features, the app has also undergone a transformation from a design perspective. In line with its new-age experience, the app is more visual with an image-first design. Commenting on this, Amarjit Singh Batra, CEO, OLX India, said,
Consumer insights played a pivotal role in conceptualizing and introducing these changes. CRUST for 2015-16, along with other consumer insights, pushed us to think about the unmet needs of the users and the new ways in which we could make selling and buying of unused goods simpler for them.
We also looked at some of the broader challenges confronting the industry. Since online is still a very nascent industry in India, users do have trust and comfort issues. Women and the new-to-net population particularly finds it hard to navigate around these. We decided to deal with the problem head-on by providing simple and tech-led solutions.
OLX is one of the largest marketplace for used cars, bikes, mobile phones, household items, and real estate in the country with 80% market share of the C2C trade. It claims to get 3.4 billion page-views a month, with 90% of its traffic coming from mobile.
