If your business involves selling products directly to the public, this article is for you. There may be potential to win new customers where you least expect it. Free ad platforms like OLX are increasingly attracting professional advertisers. In this article we will cover the gains and losses of this new sales channel.
Firstly, it is important to understand how the websites that allow advertising for free work. The most popular site of its kind in Portugal is OLX. Through this anyone, as an individual or professional can publish a new or used product for sale. For this you should take some pictures of it, make a short description and set a price. The advertisement will subsequently be reviewed and published if no site rules are violated.
Potential interested parties may contact the seller via their mobile phone (once their telephone contact is published) or by text messaging through the website's internal messaging system.
One of the great advantages that professional advertisers can benefit from is the very popularity of the platform. The traffic generated by this is quite significant, so your products will be exposed in a window that attracts thousands of visitors daily. Particularly if it's a small or medium business, your own website probably won't be able to attract the traffic that a nationwide website like OLX attracts. If it's recent, your website may not even have visitors at all. Another advantage is that the costs to be present on these sites are usually free or very low. While ad placement is free, you can purchase special highlights that enable your products to stand out from the competition. Highlights like appearing at the top of searches can be very effective and increase the number of users viewing your ads.
With respect to disadvantages these may relate more to operational issues. Due to the large exposure your products will have, it is expectable an increase in contacts and interested people who need constant follow up. You will need to have a resource available at all times to answer questions and follow up on contacts. On the other hand, a platform like OLX can exponentially increase the number of people interested in your products, which may not mean a proportional increase in revenue. Many people who request information may not end up completing a purchase. Although there is no statistical data on this, the experience of some sellers says that on such platforms the ratio of number of views to completed purchases can be quite low.
Platforms that allow you to advertise for free can be a great way to get more customers. These benefit from tremendous popularity that you can leverage to give your products greater exposure. In addition you can purchase special highlights that allow you to increase the visibility of your ads against competing ads. A major advantage of this potential sales channel is the reduced cost involved, given the exposure a site visited daily by thousands of people allows.