Olx betting on B2C segment to boost market share in used-car market

At present, OLX gets around 120,000 fresh unique B2C listing every month and 450,000 unique listings every month overall

Olx, India's largest online platform for used automobile classifieds and transactions, in 2017 saw its share of the pre-owned cars segment improving to 77 per cent from 72 per cent in 2016. The rise mainly came on account of tweak the company made to its business strategy and turned its focus more on the business to consumer (B2C) vertical. From hardly any contribution around two years ago, the vertical now contributes around 30 per cent listers to Olx.

Earlier, Olx was primarily a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform.

At present, the company gets around 120,000 fresh unique B2C listing every month, according to Sunny Kataria, director, auto category, Olx India. The portal gets 450,000 unique listings every month on the whole. "The total number of B2C listers has seen a two-fold growth in a year. Of the total 15,000 daily listings, around 30 per cent come from B2C listers," Kataria added.

B2C listings come from new car dealers with an inventory of old cars through the exchange route, as well as organised used car dealers.

The company, having decided to focus more on smaller towns and cities, now has sales teams in 50 towns across the country. Initially, it was present primarily in the top 10 cities of India. The company registered a growth rate of 50 per cent in the number of buyers, while the seller base grew by 100 percent in the pre-owned cars category during 2017. A regional break-up of car listings shows a 55 per cent share of Tier-I markets of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. The remaining 45 per cent of listings is accounted for by Tier-II cities.

Kataria also said that against a subscription-based model earlier, the company had now added more revenue streams through value-added services (ad-revenue model for listings).

The automobile category, which includes cars and bikes, is the largest section on the platform, accounting for 45 per cent of total user visits. Around 15,000 cars are listed for sale every day on Olx. Each car listing on an average gets more than 1,000 views, and almost 65 per cent of cars are sold within the first week. In 2017, transactions on the platform increased by 25 per cent – from 2.4 million units sold in 2016 to 3 million units in 2017 (January-December).

According to industry experts, the market size of pre-owned cars is estimated at 3.8 million units. That places OLX as the leader, with a 77 per cent share of the market. On the business side, revenues from pre-owned cars increased by three times for 2017-18, supported by an active base of business sellers, the launch of customised solutions and local sales support team of 200 operating across 50 cities.

In 2017, new dealer sign-ups in the automobile category doubled on the platform. To foster the community, Olx invested in dealer connect programme, Driveathon, an initiative to assist dealers to come online. In 2017, Olx ran the programme across 20 cities, touching over 3,000 dealers. It aims to expand the reach of this property to 40 cities in 2018.