Beginner’s Guide to selling on OLX.in
Disclaimer: This isn’t really a guide, just my experience. You might find a couple of useful pointers somewhere in it.
Yesterday, I sold something on OLX for the first time. OLX claims to be India’s largest marketplace for used goods. I had been seeing their TVCs for quite some time and curiosity got the better of me.
OLX has been consistently running TVCs with the theme of urging people to sell their used goods (create a listing on OLX) which is where the value chain of their business begins. The assumption is that if there’s enough supply, the demand will catch-up and, if not, can be made to catch-up. Logical.
This Womaniya campaign was a really clever one. Two things stood out in this campaign:
(1) The Ad was designed to appeal to the lady a.k.a decision maker of the house. Not a single item in a house can move from its place without her consent and OLX knows that. Even the song in the background (Womaniya) has been selected appropriately to enhance the effect. OLX decided to make her the protagonist who advocates and practices “out with the old, in with the new” and goes right ahead bypassing the husband on the way. The mother-in-law plays along as well. People who live in India will know why this can be a big deal.
(2) Urging the use of smartphone for completing the picture upload and creating the Ad (“Sell-phone”). It is quicker and more convenient as compared to using a camera and laptop. Pictures are at the very core of the second hand goods market. Pictures lend credibility to the product as well as the proposition.
The Bech-day campaign asks viewers to use OLX on the day when people are likely to have physical and mental bandwidth i.e. Sunday. Apart from telling you “why” and “how” in the earlier ads, OLX now also tells you “when” to sell your stuff. Smart.
I took the bait and decided to sell my used Air-conditioner (A/C)on OLX. Here’s some stuff that I observed in the process.
Creating the Ad was super easy. The sign-up process is quick and frictionless. There’s a Facebook login button as well. After login, a simple dashboard welcomes you with a “Submit a Free Ad” staring in your face. Creating the Ad requires 5 basic pieces of information: Ad Title, Category, Ad Description, Upload Photos and your Contact Details. Few of these sections have very useful help text so that you can create an impactful Ad.
Examples:
My Ad was titled: “Samsung 1 Ton AC Split still under warranty”. “1 Ton AC Split” or a subset of it was my best guess for a popular search term. “Samsung” was put in there to attract brand conscious buyers. “still under warranty” was my strongest value proposition and I wanted to use that as a click-bait. Though the Ad title is a short 70 character input, it might take up more time than you think. Keep plenty of room for afterthoughts. Do not blindly copy any trend that you might observe with the other listings because your Ad needs to stand out amongst the crowd and the crowd may not know what’s best for you.
Talking about click-baits, here are ones that could have done better:
“HAIER 1.5 ton split AC in working condition” ~ “working condition” is a very basic prerequisite for second hand white goods (duh)
“Whirlpool window AC 1.5 ton, Compressor problem” ~ One must be honest but save that for the description, not the title
“Hitachi 1.5 Ton 1.5 Year Old Just 12500” ~ The price needn’t be mentioned in the title because it appears prominently on the right-hand side of the search result anyways
“Voltas 1.5 ton Ac” ~ Just basic details, no value proposition
Ones that caught my attention:
“1.5 ton LG air conditioner with stabilizer” ~ I figured out later that a lot of people are very particular about getting a stabilizer with the AC. So good move.
“Panasonic Cube AC 1.5 Ton With Bill” ~ The bill lends some credibility to the genuineness of the product and its pricing
“Toshiba split AC 1.5 ton 5 star energy efficient Sparingly used” ~ the star rating of an AC is indicative of its power consumption. A very good value proposition.
The template then asks you to enter the selling price. I casually went through similar A/Cs up for sale and decided to price my A/C ~ 30% higher than them. I will elaborate on this later.
Before you fill out the Ad Description, note that its impact will be felt only after a visitor has landed on the Ad. So without a good click-bait, it can prove quite worthless. While writing mine, I followed OLX’s suggestion and here’s what I came up with:
- Selling this unit since I have moved to an apartment with central A/C (I wanted to start out with the reason for selling to reduce suspicion in the buyer’s mind)
- Only 7 months old, purchased in March 2015 (in short, relatively new)
- Still under warranty period, invoice available (warranty = cost savings in case of some standard technical issues)
- Genuine, purchased from Croma, invoice available (mentioning the source of the original purchase. Croma is a well-known, credible brand that would never sell non-genuine stuff)
- With outdoor unit, rubber stands, remote control (additional deliverables)
I always try and put the value proposition in a sequence that will make the buyer most comfortable and not opt out midway. In this case, I put the additional deliverables in the end because there’s no point talking about until the buyer has got the answer to the question — is this guy selling broken stuff to me? So I spent 4 bullet points only putting the buyer at ease.
I later realized that I should have explicitly mentioned that the voltage stabilizer was not part of the package. I had skipped it because I wasn’t sure whether it worked properly. Also, for someone purchasing an A/C worth ~ 10k–15k Rupees, a voltage stabilizer worth ~ 1.5k wouldn’t matter and they can make that investment in a new stabilizer. I was wrong. All interested buyers except one asked for a stabilizer to be included as part of the package. I inferred 2 things from this:
- Complete “packages” are likely to sell faster
- People are more cost-conscious in the second hand goods market than buying first-hand
Pictures can make or break your deal. The first pic of the sequence will be picked up as the main thumbnail pic of your search result listing. And I can safely say that a bad pic can nullify the impact of a great description as well as pricing. Some good news here — most pics on OLX (at least in my experience) suck big time! And this is an opportunity for sellers to really pack a punch with some nicely shot, instagrammed pics.
Compare this to the screenshot below and more such listings here.
OLX recommends 4–6 pics per listing but I believe 2 good pics (with filter) create much more impact than 4–6 average pics. Also, this number depends a lot on the type of product and its level of customization e.g. furniture might require more pics from different angles since furniture design is customized. A/Cs on the other hand are fairly commoditized nowadays.
Coming back to pricing, since I was showcasing a product that’s relatively newer than the others, under warranty, genuine and looked better (:P), it would have been odd to price it lower. I clearly wanted the price to signal “this is a better proposition than the others”.
After the Ad was uploaded, I would get an inquiry once in two days. This frequency will vary depending on your product, listing quality, pricing, terms as well as season. In my case, I was selling an A/C when its almost winters. Frankly, I had little hope of selling it but I found a buyer eventually. In fact, the buyer wanted to purchase the A/C in off season to get a better deal. Yeah, there are people who plan that much in advance!
Almost half of the buyers who called seemed to be “window shoppers” or “bargainers”. They would call and straightaway ask for the “actual” price. When I would stand firm on my pricing, they would end the conversation with slight frustration evident in their tone. I never heard from these buyers again. Though I have no proof, my guess was that they were dealers who bought stuff off OLX and re-sold them at a mark-up to naive buyers. Why do I think so? Genuine buyers rarely behave this way when they are serious about buying. Remember, the price point was visible to this buyer before the call so there is really no need to bring up the topic first thing. Stuff that was common to all the genuine buyers:
- They asked questions about the product first
- They asked lots of questions about the product
- They did bargain, but towards the end of the call
- They rarely gave “take-it-or-leave-it” counter-offers on the price
With regards to pricing, its a good idea to have a plan in place. In my case, I had decided to drop the price in decrements of 15% every week for the next 3 weeks. But I would let a single price point remain on the site for at least once week and not change it midway. Desperation is your biggest enemy here. There’s no need to get desperate. After all, you don’t do this for a living, do you?
What was also interesting in the process was the profile of the buyer. Most buyers were not from Delhi NCR but suburbs and interiors of Haryana. From my conversations with them, I could figure out that these buyers would rarely fit in the frame of a typical online shopper. These were people who wanted to own stuff they hitherto considered luxuries. But they were now ready to invest in them since owning a second hand item in decent condition is the next best thing to buying new stuff. They weren’t internet-savvy but most of them had an e-mail ID they rarely used. I figured that these are the people sitting at the fringes of the online world, had the intent but didn’t know how to traverse the second mile. My buyer told me in as many words that though investing in an A/C is a luxury for him, he wanted to fulfil the wishes of his children who had been asking for it. He lives in a small town 50 kms from Delhi.
Since OLX facilitates only discovery, the rest of the transaction has to be completed offline. It means several coordination phone calls between buyers and sellers and, quite frequently, multiple rounds of re-negotiation on the way to completing the transaction. (Tip: I kept a deadline for completing the transaction.) And this can be frustrating for a lot of people. Keen to see how OLX addresses this in future.
Since there’s no payment mechanism on OLX, all transactions are done offline. Tip: Only accept 100% upfront payment in cash / DD and never cheque.
A lot of buyers also ask the stupid question of guarantee. I call it stupid because it is unreasonable to expect guarantees in the second hand goods market. A company’s guarantee still holds some meaning because they have the wherewithal to fix a technical snag or replace the item but an individual’s guarantee means nothing. The best possible “guarantee” is to show the item in running condition. In my case, this was impossible because I had already dismantled the A/C. Absence of guarantee is a risk all buyers have to live with in the second hand goods market.
OLX is not half as sophisticated as e-bay. But it seems to be effective. Also, in an India context, many more people can now own stuff that they once considered luxuries.
Happy Selling.
