OLX is reaching out to powersellers through email and a public relations campaign in order to bulk up its U.S. listings, and AuctionBytes spoke to one of the site's cofounders this week. Fabrice Grinda founded the international classifieds site with Alec Oxenford in March 2006 and the pair has raised $28.5 million in funding. Grinda told AuctionBytes that OLX has 70 million unique monthly visitors worldwide.
While OLX focuses on real estate brokers, car dealers and head hunters, it also accepts XML feeds from merchants in all categories, including the For Sale category.
Grinda is adamant that OLX will remain free in order to have as many listings as possible. The company generates revenue through advertising and featured-listing fees and also runs classifieds for other companies.
OLX operates in 89 countries in 39 languages. Grinda said OLX competes head-to-head with Kijiji in Spain, but OLX is stronger in Latin America, Eastern Europe and certain parts of Southeast Asia. OLX' strengths include its advanced search capabilities, its mobile WAP site, and seller applications for Facebook and Open Social that allow sellers to promote their listings beyond the OLX marketplace.
Grinda is a serial entrepreneur in international ecommerce. In 1998 at the age of 23, he left his career with consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New York to co-found Aucland S.A. in France, which became one of the top auction sites in Europe. He co-founded Deremate, a Latin American auction site that was sold to MercadoLibre (partly owned by eBay) in November 2005. And in 2001 he launched Zingy, selling the business in 2004 for $80 million.
Regional Differences in Classifieds
Grinda said that while top level categories such as jobs, personals, real estate and vehicles are the same across the world, there are regional sub-category differences due to cultural and legal differences. For example, in India, many people rent rooms in their homes, so there is a large "paying guests" category. Another example - wine is big in France on classifieds sites.
Another difference in classifieds worldwide is that in markets such as the U.S., classifieds have evolved from newspapers, to sites such as Monster.com and HotJobs, and finally to free sites such as Craigslist, while in developing countries such as India, newspapers are still growing, and the markets are very nascent.
It's difficult to compete with Craigslist head-on in the U.S., according to Grinda, who said that despite its problems with "spam and scam" and the fact that it remains a 1995 website, Craigslist ultimately works well for sellers and shoppers. But he clearly believes his sites features are better, and said there is no downside to adding OLX as a channel, whose U.S. site receives 3 to 4 million unique monthly visitors.
Information on submitting feeds to OLX is available on the website (link), and additional information about seller tools to promote listings on Facebook, MySpace and blogs is forthcoming.
