Mr. Batra, Country Head India for Olx Classifieds spoke to us earlier this week [Part-1 of Interview]. In continuation of the same hre is the second part.
Operations of Olx in India and how the Indian platform is served and scaled
India specific operations include local marketing, category developments, content development, localization, and partnerships in Web and Mobile. We have centralized team for product, SEO, integrations; customer support etc and we work with those teams for India specific projects and requirements. I work along this global team to manage the India operations. We are in a business that is highly scalable and we prefer to keep lean teams that can work across geographical boundaries.
Monetization Plans of Olx other than Advertisement
We are having text ads (currently provided by Google) as the only monetization option. Our core site will always be 100% free. However we have launched “Featured Listings” in few countries that allows users to get prominent placement on the site. This is certainly a value add to the advertisers, without compromising on the free listings that one can still post. We do not have any immediate plans to introduce this in India.
New Feature Roll out and Mobile / 3G strategy
We continuously work on new features and roll it our globally either phase wise or in one go. There would be new features and improvements in the pipeline but I would wait till we go live.
Our mobile site can be accessed with any basic mobile. One can browse all listings with pictures and videos, read your messages and reply to ads, post ads and even do a 1-click call to the ad poster. It’s so easy to post an ad already and it takes less than a minute to make an ad posting from the mobile. Of course, the smart phones and 3G will only enhance the experience.
Biggest Challenge ahead for Mr. Batra at Olx
Though we are completely free to use compared to the high cost a print classifieds advertiser has to pay for limited exposure, there are still challenges of awareness that we have to overcome. Car dealers, real estate brokers, head hunters find us online, but a lot of them are not aware of OLX and it’s a challenge make these segments aware of how they can use OLX. We are confident of overcoming this challenge.
But our biggest challenge and probably the biggest opportunity in India is to tap into the huge rural and semi urban population who are not comfortable with internet or do not have access to PC’s. Also, these people are more comfortable in communicating in their local languages and not in English. We hope that the mobile version of our site and our presence in other local languages position us to win these users.