[TusharK]

According to the online classifieds portal OLX, transactions in the automobile category increased from 2.4 million units sold in 2016 to 3 million in 2017 - a growth of 25%. The market size for pre-owned cars in India is estimated at 3.8 million units. This means, 3/4th of all online used car sales happened on its platform.



The automobile category, which includes both cars and bikes, is the largest section on the platform that amounts for 45% of the total user visits. 15,000 cars are listed on OLX every day and each car listing receives more than 1,000 views. Moreover, 65% of the cars are sold within the first week from the day of the listing.

OLX increased its revenues from used car sales by three times during the period of FY2017-18. New dealer sign ups in the automobile category also doubled during this period. Overall, the seller base grew by 100% and the number buyers went up by 50%. According to the company, majority of its users (55%) are from Tier-1 cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, while the remaining 45% are from Tier 2 cities.

Link to Team-BHP News

[Turbanator]

I won't dispute, have sold 2 of our cars via OLX in recent past, I can confirm that the maximum response comes via OLX. Of course, there are many low ballers but since you can opt for chat only option, no personal information is shared and you can answer to serious enquiries. Similarly, if I have to find a used car, OLX has maximum listings, nothing comes close surely.

[SmartCat]

I found a buyer via OLX too.

transactions in the automobile category increased from 2.4 million units sold in 2016 to 3 million in 2017

I guess they get the confirmed transactions data when a seller tries to remove the ad. There is a question and a set of answers in a drop-down list. They just add up the number of "Sold via OLX" replies.

[GTO]

Don't know about this claim of theirs, but OLX is really killing it in the online classifieds space & I will believe that they are outselling all the other players combined.

I found my car on OLX. IIRC, my Civic's buyer was found via OLX too. I realised the power of OLX when I heard of two stories:

1. BHPian Parrys listed his bike for sale on a Saturday, and in less than 48 hours, it was sold.

2. My brother listed his iPhone one working afternoon. In 2 hours, his phone was sold with cash in hand!

[CrAzY dRiVeR]

Originally Posted by TusharK

According to the online classifieds portal OLX, transactions in the automobile category increased from 2.4 million units sold in 2016 to 3 million in 2017 - a growth of 25%.

So OLX is selling several times more than traditional channels?

Maruti Suzuki True Value had reported 4.2L annual sales last year - and that itself was good enough to make them the 3rd highest if it were to be considered a seperate company, below Maruti and Hyundai.

At 3 million units - They're selling more units than Maruti Suzuki itself does in a year?

What am I missing?

[bansal.sushant]

That's an interesting statistic but how does OLX monitor the sales and come to such a conclusion.

If they are doing so by counting the "Sold via OLX" replies, I think that would be an incorrect estimate since majority people don't bother removing their ads or reporting them as sold, and OLX doesn't seem stupid to not consider that.

Not questioning their claim since I myself know people who have bought and sold cars via OLX, just curious.

[SmartCat]

Originally Posted by CrAzY dRiVeR

So OLX is selling several times more than traditional channels? What am I missing?

Originally Posted by bansal.sushant

Not questioning their claim since I myself know people who have bought and sold cars via OLX, just curious.

Nice catch, gentlemen. OLX's claim does not add up. Now these are the known facts -

1) We closed 2017 with new car sales of 3.3 million units
2) Used car to new car sales ratio is 1.3. So we can roughly say that 4.3 million used cars were sold. However, the press release says market size for used cars is estimated to be around 3.8 million.

What we don't know is offline (via organized and unorganized used car dealerships) to online sales mix. But still, if the entire used car market size is 3.8 to 4.3 million, its unlikely that OLX was responsible for 3 million sales because I'd assume that offline used car sales are still very significant.

[Vitalstatistiks]

Haha. This is like the claims by IIT coaching institutes- "Rank 1 to rank 50, all are our students", when their connection with the students would just be some online reading material.

Olx is mega, no doubt. But to claim that all the cars listed on their platform, are sold from their platform is plain laughable. To continue with the IIT analogy, they are like "Brilliant tutorials" from the 90s, which every aspiring IIT-ian subscribed to and if successful, was duly feature as a "student of Brilliant Tutorials", regardless of the minimal contribution of Brilliant to his/her success. Similar, OLX, being the giant it is, must definitely be used by anyone looking to sell car or bike, but to suggest that the buyer and seller eventually connected on OLX is a very, very different thing. The former may be true, but I don't know how OLX can even claim the latter. All they would know is that one day the product listed on their platform was sold or the ad expired.

[locusjag]

I doubt for how long the status quo will exist in India, for incumbent buying/selling sites like OLX and Quikr. I have seen Facebook's Marketplace in comparison to old-timer Craigslist in the US and it's just so much better.

There's a seamless integration with FB messenger and many features that make the whole process of selling and buying so much easier on FB's marketplace. Here are key features I loved while selling my car and multiple other household items in 2017 in the US:
* AI to suggest the price-point at which the item(s) can sell faster
* For the seller - if he/she's courting multiple prospective buyers, once sold, FB messenger informs every other prospective buyer that the item is sold. There's no painful need for the seller to go on and update all the others out there.
* FB automatically selects to whom the ad should be shown; it's all based on a specified distance from the seller's known location. Compare this to Olx and its peers where the buyer has to apply location filters before seeing ads that suit them.
* Response-rate and response-time of the seller is displayed on the ad to the buyer (useful to the buyer primarily, but works well for the seller once the statistics favor them)

Marketplace seems to be picking up steam here in India as well, although I can't find concrete numbers for the same. Gentlemen, I just want to put this out here at this point in time. If I were a betting man, I'd bet on FB's marketplace based purely on its ease of use. It's miles ahead of Olx feature-wise.

[procrj]

Originally Posted by TusharK

The automobile category, which includes both cars and bikes

Originally Posted by smartcat

Nice catch, gentlemen. OLX's claim does not add up

Need to consider both 2 & 4 Wheelers While the number might be off the important thing to consider is that as a platform, it has been very successful in connecting buyers and sellers with minimum friction. Which really asks the question - why should I use offline car/bike sales units? What additional value do they add?

Edit: Just a thought - what if a large volume of buyers on OLX are offline re-sellers? What if they have realized that they can buy the product from sellers who are anxious to sell at maybe a slightly lower price. Then these re-sellers sell to unsuspecting buyers from tier B or Non urban areas and make a nifty margin on the sale. Just a hypothesis, will be interesting if we can get some kind of info and validate. And re-sellers need not be the unbranded showrooms, they can even be True Value!

[R-Six]

There are a couple of more things to consider to the numbers that OLX have quoted.

These days, even dealers list their inventory on OLX and other similar online market place. In that sense, I think even the footfalls these leading used car dealers would be getting would be through OLX itself.

Another thing to consider is that of duplicate listing. I have often seen multiple listings of the same car on the portal. Rather than revising the selling price, sellers often add a new listing for the same car with the new quote.

Since OLX is not going to charge you anything if you mark an item as sold (if I’m not wrong, portals like Ebay do charge some $$ to set up a seller account as well and when an item is sold through them), I’m guessing that the sellers might be closing their listing as “Sold” rather than removing it from their listing history altogether.

These things might be skewing the numbers that OLX is looking at. And as a marketing strategy, OLX might not be worried about these differences as well since it is always good to have such inflated or big number when you are trying to issue an advertising material.

[chiranjitp]

OLX has become the Maruti Suzuki of online used cars. I have bought 2 cars & sold one car through OLX during the last 2 years. In mid 2015 I was in search of a cheap used car for my college duties, the number of cars that were/are available in OLX are huge compared to other websites like Quikr, Cardekho etc.

My car buying & selling experience on OLX was not so good, almost all the used cars I saw were priced on higher side (way more than the market value), even if the cars were 12-16 years old the odometer reading in most cases were around 45000-55000 km only . Most of the sellers were car dealers, even today finding a genuine seller on OLX is difficult (at least in OLX Assam). Anyways the first car I bought was in a bad condition (a 98 ZEN), so I wanted to sell her immediately & posted an advertisement on OLX. In those days on OLX you could get the seller's number without login, hence I did get a lot of inquiries. But most of the buyers were used car dealers & they kind of wanted to buy my car for peanuts, one guy claimed that he had recently bought a 03 ZEN VXi for 15K & he would buy my car (a 98 ZEN) for 20K. Finally after a month I was able to find a genuine buyer & the price I got was fair enough.

Just a month later I found a good looking 01 ZEN for sale, which had done around 90K km & from the description, the seller seemed like a genuine guy. I bought the car for around 80K (on the higher side for a 14 year old ZEN) & luckily for me the car turned out to be quite reliable. In September 2016 we exchanged our 2012 Punto MJD with an Ecosport, we sold our Punto for just 150K to the Ford dealer. Just after a week I saw our Punto on OLX with the Odometer reading changed to half of what we had done & the price was set at 240K. As luck with have it, my Mother once met the new owner & struck a conversation, the new owner told my Mother that he had bought the car for 210K with 44K KM on the odometer (we had done around 103K KM).

Even today I go through OLX Guwahati daily & check out most of the cheap cars. The following are the observations that I have made about OLX-

• About 60-70 % of the sellers on OLX are used car dealers.
• Most of the cars, specially the diesel cars & old cars have had their odometer reading reduced.
• The few genuine car owners who put an add on OLX quote a price which is on the higher side, at times higher than the price quoted by the car dealers.
• With great luck, you might be able to find a few genuine sellers on OLX, who will also quote a reasonable price.
• Most of the genuine sellers tend to exchange their cars (for cheap) with a new car, hence avoiding the hassle of posting an add on OLX & going through numerous buyers .

All the observations I have made are only applicable to OLX Guwahati, I am sure the scenario is better in bigger cities.

[NetfreakBombay]

OLX has a major reputation risk at its hand. It can easily derail OLX's growth as online car platform (Due to ticket sizes)

Risk is : Way too many stories of gangs creating "Standard Operating Procedure" around OLX and similar classifieds ads.

Two common themes :

1. Run of the mill : Take advance an disappear
2. Attractive deal to lure buyers / sellers for extortion

Recent examples :

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...w/63192955.cms

[IndieGooner]

Originally Posted by GTO

1. BHPian Parrys listed his bike for sale on a Saturday, and in less than 48 hours, it was sold.

I managed to sell my bike in the matter of six hours!! I placed the ad at around 11:00 in the morning and was inundated with messages soon. There were many low ballers, but the whole thing works in a very direct manner. You don't simply waste much time on a buyer who is not genuine. I shared my contact number only to those few prospects who seemed promising. The eventual buyer arrived at around 3:00PM, final price settled, RTO procedures initiated and bike was handed over by 5:00 PM.
I had placed an ad on another platform as well. To this day it has not been removed and I have not received a SINGLE follow up from it.

[moralfibre]

Everything that I wanted to get rid of from our old household items to cars to cellphones have always found quick buyers on OLX. The transactions are fair and transparent if you adhere to basic guidelines set by them.

Interestingly, each time you post an ad on Olx, you'll quickly receive calls from cardekho.com and some other random websites who'd want to port your listing for them. I believe each of them has a full team dedicated to keep sniffing the ad space on olx to get their listings on their portals. Needless to say, all replies that I got have always been from Olx and none of the so called online car ad portals have any traction.

Secondly, Olx has some pretty good penetration in rural India too. When I listed our old Maruti 800 and Vento for sale at different times, we got inquiries from places as far as Karad, Wardha, Latur, Ahmenagar among others. Every smartphone holding Indian does surf through Olx for their needs and does manage to get what they need from far off towns.

Olx is certainly the Craigslist equivalent for India.