How to start selling on OLX

29.01.2025 0 Comments

Do you need an additional source of targeted traffic for your services or products, or do you just want to get your first orders before developing a full-fledged website? OLX will be a good choice. This site has 2 positions in the search results for many queries in Google search and has 2 positions in the search results for specific queries. It is easier to get the first reviews for the rating system than on most marketplaces. And most importantly, advertising services within the platform are quite affordable.

Security in the OLH

Be sure to start by studying the security recommendations so that fraudsters do not spoil your experience – Security in OLX. This is relevant not only for buyers – read carefully, sellers often respond to various phishing methods, and should avoid them.

Determine the phone number for the platform where you will register your profile – the device must be locked (set a password on your phone/tablet/computer). There may be problems if you use the same phone number in several profiles – if you go for multi-accounting, do it responsibly (different passwords, no overlapping contacts between accounts, different names and descriptions, and links to the site from the business profile). It is advisable to have a SIM replacement blocker on the number without the owner’s passport (now you can also protect your SIM on Diia), because fraudsters will try to dial you from 3 different numbers and wait for you to redial to these 3 numbers – so they can name the last three numbers you called when you restore the SIM with your number.

It is obviously not worth reminding you about a serious unique password (you obviously have a solution on how to remember it or where to store it – or I will write about it next time). When registering an account for someone, they will receive a code (usually not by SMS, but by Viber) – the rest of the account setup does not require the participation of a manager who will answer calls to this number.

When registering an account by email, it is a good idea to have two-factor authentication in it and definitely do not make the same passwords for the OLX and your email. You can also log in (register) to a personal account through a Google account or Facebook profile – it’s safe and, most importantly, faster, but then it will not be as convenient to maintain such a profile (entrust it to a manager) as it would be with a login and password.

Setting up your OLX profile

In the account, we are interested in the Profile tab. Enter your real name or business name, the nearest neighborhood, and your phone number. A photo can be automatically pulled from a connected social media account when you log in here, just save it and go to the Settings section.

There are many tabs in Settings, and we are interested in the following:

Change contact information – here you can disable the display of photos from your social media profile (if you have previously linked it), check the area and Name/Business Name (do not disable autocomplete – if you fill in everything correctly, it helps)
Logo and banner – It is mandatory to upload a logo (so your profile is more visible), a banner is optional, but with the correct use of a call to action (text on the picture) or a status picture, ads with paid promotion will be more visible and effective. Attention! You will not be able to upload a logo in the Ukrainian-language interface – this bug has not been fixed yet – switch to the Russian-language interface, upload a logo (usually it scales your square image normally (depending on the browser, there may be difficulties – then save a copy of the logo and use a photo editor, for example, Paint 3D, to reduce the size of the logo). The banner is very narrow 1180*180px– try to use the space efficiently.
The rest can be bypassed now.

OLX Delivery section – if you provide this service, because maybe you just have a service (in some categories it is mandatory due to fraudsters), set it up properly, high-quality work on this delivery method stimulates an increase in the number of good reviews, and therefore the profile will develop better.

We are not touching the business page settings yet, we will return after paying for the advertising service.

It is important to consider and “count”

Let’s just mention a product business that has a lot of products and you want to place them on the platform – do not rush to take large ad packages, they are valid for only 30 days after purchase, a very common mistake is to buy a package for 7500 products, and in a month you will only have time to use 2-3 thousand. An ad placed from an ad package is also valid for 30 days from the date of its placement, which does not mean that if the package expires in 2 days, then the ad at the end of the period will be placed on the OLX for only a couple of days – from the moment it is published, the ad will be active for its 30 days. If you want to allocate a certain budget per month to the platform, it is better to simply replenish your account, from which it will be more convenient (so as not to enter card details or confirmation via GooglePay every time) to quickly pay for advertising services or placement, or to buy packages for a large number of goods in smaller batches. The bottom line: don’t chase the savings of 50 kopecks per ad from the number in the package – take a package for a moderate number of ads that you will have time to work on qualitatively.

Not counting the possibility of placing one ad for free in certain categories (there are non-commercial sections where there are more opportunities, but they are unlikely to be relevant to us), the price of the platform for placing ads consists of a fee for placing the ad itself and a fee for advertising it (and the latter can be different). If you ask “how much does it cost to advertise my product in this section?” and you are told that the price of placing an ad is 99 UAH, and its advertising in the TOP for a month is 749 UAH, it does not mean that you need to multiply 749 by the number of ads you need – it means that the platform itself, excluding the work of the person who places the ad for you (free of charge, if you do it yourself) charges 99 UAH for placing an ad in the category from the example for 30 days + 749 UAH for a specific TOP advertising service for 30 days – so multiply the number of products you want to place and advertise by 848 UAH in this case.

We follow the terms – if you are interested in the offer of 99 UAH for placing an ad in the category from the example and the opportunity to get a significant discount by placing an ad in the TOP for 30 days for 749 UAH (because placing a week in the TOP for a month will be much more expensive) and you decide to place an ad now, and you decide to pay for the TOP for 30 days in two weeks – then it will hang in the TOP for only two weeks, because the placement period is only 30 days – this means that for an ad in this category you will need to pay another 99 UAH (the price of the category from the example) when the placement time expires so that it is simply published and finalize those two weeks in the TOP from the previous month that you paid. These are the conditions of mathematics, calendar and OLX. At the same time, for placement in the new month, if it is not by yourself, but the manager maintains your profile and places the ad, he will take his own, albeit small, but payment for placement in the new month – for you it is just “Publish again”, and for him (if he is a serious person) it is the need to revise and improve the description text, possibly change the photo – a full-fledged work.

Another note when buying packages – When you buy an ad package, you order it from a specific GEO and you cannot change it. There is a package of universal ads and they are so much more expensive that it is better to just place ads in the regions you need without a package. Do not be fooled by small savings – it is better to buy more ads than to buy a lot of placements in a non-target region or where you do not need more ads than you already have.

Selling strategy on OLX

Please note that there is now a rating system for reviews – try to provide services or sell goods so that people want to leave you a good review. But don’t hesitate to press the customer for a review – it will help other buyers make their choice. Even if your product is of high quality, but not very attractive or used, it can best meet the needs of customers – let them write reviews. You can protect yourself from the negative by asking the customer in the correspondence: “Are you satisfied with your purchase? If yes, leave a review. If you have any comments, write to us so that we can resolve the factors that depend on us.”

The recommendation system (additional suggestions next to the ad) works well when you have at least 5 ads in one particular category. It’s easier with goods – there can be 5 or more of them, and with services – think about whether you have something to offer in an important category for you. It would be enough to have 4 ads per category, but constant rotation and the ability to add bright, catchy first photos from experience suggests that this number of ads in one category will work effectively – because those who want to order immediately call, the more indecisive will write, and let the rest go to other YOUR additional ads, not those of competitors in the category.

How to efficiently place this minimum of 5 ads in one category in order not to overpay and get maximum efficiency:

First, write your first ad – try to analyze in advance the search recommendations for the target query in the OLX itself – which categories are most often offered for the queries that interest you. In these categories, look at effective headlines – let it be your option if nothing inspired, but you don’t need to spam everything in a row in one headline and unrelated areas of activity, it’s clear that you want all customers for yourself, but the strength is in a narrow topic and solving a specific customer problem (you don’t want to – you can’t get away with one ad, because it looks like an attempt to shoot a fleeing deer with the last cartridge of a rusty gun – don’t spray a list of everything you do in one ad – I’ll repeat it again, because they don’t listen, try everything that doesn’t work and then proudly report that I was right when I gave recommendations). We decided on the headline – the main essence of the “meat” in the beginning in an already short 70-character headline, and we put the solution to the problem, or the emphasis (promotion, bonus, packaging, delivery, service, warranty – depending on what we are talking about).

Choose a category carefully! Based on the name you entered, OLX will try to recommend 1-3 categories, and often these are not your target categories at all. From the previous paragraph, you have identified the target categories – choose the most active one. Here it is easier with goods – everything is clear, and services sometimes have 2 options – do not make a mistake if you do it yourself, and do not entrust this task to the placement manager, because after publishing the ad, you will not be able to change the category of this ad. You might say that you can delete an ad and create as many new ones as you want – there is some truth in that, but there is another catch and I will highlight it in a separate next paragraph – because you can’t lose it.

The number of views on an ad directly affects its display (for example, the rating) – so never delete old ads, let them hang in the Ads – Inactive section, but when they have new information to add to this ad from a specific section, you will publish it with a counter of, for example, 10,720 views. Even visually, it will look better than an ad with 16 views, which will also jump to zero when the OLX algorithm pulls up that you personally, without even logging in, have updated the page so many times (they have been fighting cheating for a long time, but they respect honest indicators).

Fill out the description in the following order – you should repeat the title in the first line, but you can slightly adjust its ending. Add a high-quality informative description, do not forget to repeat the key query or queries in the text a sufficient number of times, but without spamming (you can always add useful information to the ad – FAQs that your customers value, ways to use what you offer in the ad, etc.) Motivate at the beginning and end to call or chat – what is your target (do not include the phone number here – if not the algorithms, then the moderator will wipe it out and it will just be an ugly ad from the same hunter who is trying to catch a deer in all ways, but to no avail). Do not skip double line breaks (enter-enter) – when saved, they will become 1 line break, try to separate paragraphs of text in this way, but when you add an ad to the available text space, add a translation into another language below – make a space, some character so that it does not stick together and then a line break again – this way the distance between languages will be greater and it will be more pleasant to read. For example, the ad is in Ukrainian and the translation is in Russian below (after all, people are still used to the fact that search results in Ukrainian are of poor quality or not targeted and they google in Russian, and Google does not want to improve its results in Cyrillic languages, and you remember how well OLX is shown in Google search).

We don’t turn on auto-renewal – it’s better to control it manually, it only messes up the order of publication in certain categories where there is free publication and then you have to keep track of the dates for advertising.
There may be additional parameters, subcategories depending on the main category, choose carefully and without unnecessary – there is no need to check all the subcategories in a row if the service does not apply to them – it will be of little use. Check that the location is correct, name, phone, email. We return to the description that we have been working on for so long, select it all – you can use the ctrl+A combination, copy it – you can use the ctrl+C combination and then click publish only at the bottom – there are jokes in OLX when something hangs, the page has refreshed – “please fill in everything again…”.

Here’s the interesting part:

To publish (if it is not the first free ad for some categories), OLX will ask you to pay for the placement – It is not just for this reason that you are offered a placement package – and we need not just a package of ads – we need Premium – we take at least 3 ads (there are no smaller packages). You can’t activate this feature in single ads – only a package and Premium. Its difference is in the activation of the “Updated Business Page” function. A regular ad package will also have a business page, but without the bells and whistles, very important bells and whistles. And from the ad on the logo in the advanced version, a person will be able to go to your business profile (it’s already on the Internet, as a link to it), and the banner at the top will be beautiful (if you add it), and at least 5 ads (which in this package will be shown under your ad – I wrote about it above), so that the profile, contacts, map and the holy of holies – a description of the business profile with a link to the main site – look serious.

The description of the business profile should be SEO’d properly – you can try it yourself, sometimes owners manage to write something meaningful without spamming, but it’s better to add a good, long description here that will help the page rank in search. Neglect the markup and indents here – they will still be compressed, but this description (at least its upper part) will be displayed near your ads (on the right on PCs, below on mobile) and effective text there (business, about experience and expertise, status, business opportunities) can very qualitatively strengthen behavioral factors through trust from potential customers. Think it through – don’t just do it haphazardly.

Also, in the settings, when editing your business page, be sure to set the address of your company’s personal page in the olx.ua domain – this is a subdomain, it is this subdomain that can be used as a mini-site to boost links – this subdomain can collect links to itself and qualitatively boost your main business site specified in the appropriate field. Therefore, even if you pump it with links from profiles or something else cheap, try to choose thematic sites so that the traffic is relevant and will bring the same quality to your site.

We do not need to spend money on all 5 ads in the Premium package – the savings are that we take a package for 3 ads, and two more will be regular – they will be added to the recommendations for the main ones anyway, just fill them with quality, as described above. If your business operates in more than one category, make 5 ads for each category, and at least 3 of them are in this Premium package (the rest will be pulled up and offered by it – they will be okay, but at least 3 ads are full-fledged). Even 50 or 500 products per category (if the business is narrowly focused) – but to activate all the benefits of the business page, you need at least one package for 3 Premium ads to have a functional business page and other benefits for your account. Because you can place at least 5000 products without the minimum Premium package and not get the opportunities that OLX provides quite inexpensively.

It was just a placement, then advertising…

Raising ads is expensive and inefficient. You can dabble, but the profitability must be good to raise ads frequently for the amount that OLX wants. Moreover, the feed of ads in OLX is no longer chronological (whoever has published or recently raised an ad gets the slippers). It’s a rating feed – ad views, reviews, Premium package… Of course, they left a barely noticeable button to see who has recently posted something, but no one uses it – there is no chronological feed – forget about the upvotes (there are rarely cases where the upvotes have given at least something other than traffic from bots that will only increase views, but these are not real users – they do not write or call.

TOP for 7 days and 30 days – it is logical that the weekly option is more expensive than the economical option for a month, there are categories where the price is biting for both – but you should always take it for 30 days, unless it is a one-time sale, for example, an old boiler…

The VIP ad is a pointless thing, it hasn’t been fixed and there are no plans to fix it. The joke is that it makes you the “king” in the PC version of the OLX, shows you on the main page of the OLX (but few people just wander around the main page of this bulletin board without a purpose – everyone knows which category they are interested in), and in the mobile version you will not be seen at all, although you should be above the TOP ads, but there is no advertising space there, despite the fact that 90% of people use the site on mobile… so there.

Advertising packages: Easy Start is not about systematic business, Turbo Sale includes from its 30 days of publication for 7 days of VIP status of the ad with the disadvantages I described above, so it remains optimal to look only at the Fast Sale package – but it is only about 7 days of TOP – and the three raises in it look like a good bonus for the price, but you already know that OLX boosts are useless, so they are of little use (only if you need to collect more views from bots and parsers looking for something interesting for them, if you are very worried about low views in the first week). Bottom line: packages are not our friends – as professionals, we take services separately.

Therefore, it is worth unchecking the Quick Sale package offered by default and selecting TOP for 30 days (manually change the switch below from 7 to 30). Add to cart and pay for placement and advertising. Tips: Get a separate card (a virtual Internet card – for example, in PrivatBank – it is free and safer to use on such sites). Entering card details every time is time-consuming, and it’s not very serious to save them in the browser, authorization through Privat is long, so either add the card to GooglePay – payments will be in a few clicks and confirmation is simple or even without it if you are using a reliable device, or top up your account for a normal amount in the OLX account and you will be able to quickly pay for advertising or it will be convenient for the manager you assign to manage your profile.

We put such ads in the TOP 30 days for 1 ad, a maximum of 2-3 ads from the group (and then, if there is a promotion for advertising, or you really have three key services or products in which your business is strong or has a good margin). You don’t need to put all 5 ads in the TOP – that’s the joke, they will be so dispersed in the search results in their category that searchers will find them almost every screen – and if you drive all of them to the TOP, it will be more expensive, and in categories overloaded with competition, they will not receive impressions, and in freer categories (or when searching for queries) they will be visible without the TOP. In the extreme case, if you see that one of your ads, without being in the TOP, has started to break out in the statistics with a different headline or photo, you need to boost it even more by including it in the TOP.

There are promotions in the OLX, but they are either for some unpopular category or they offer a discount only for advertising services, which means that the ad itself will be at full price. Discounts are nice, but they encourage you to spend more on advertising services than you planned according to your strategy, so don’t deviate from your strategy – it’s better to advertise a little bit and all year long than to flash brightly and disappear in 2 months.

Other opportunities with OLX

A separate thing – maybe it’s too early, but you need to know that there are such areas – use Google Ads – namely Advertising in the KMS (contextual media network – these are forums, blogs, sites that host Google ads) – advertising on the OLX, in all sections for your offer at once is possible, just set up advertising and exclude display on unnecessary sites – but depending on what you offer, you need to think about it, but the main thing is to know that this functionality is available.

There is banner advertising in OLX – you can brand this entire site with your ad, it’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s more important to think about the meanings you want to convey through the banner to the audience that will see it – there are such clumsy decisions when a potential client simply doesn’t understand why they need the information they see… You need a teamwork between a designer and a marketer, because a designer without a marketer will make something beautiful, but completely unusable.

Blog articles on OLX – you can actually even post your own article on OLX on their blog for free, and what’s more – it’s actually read! But writing something really interesting is a challenge… Think about how you could reveal your expertise or help solve a problem for your target audience so that they would want to share this material.

I will add more here, a little later…

Good to know

If there is only one photo in the ad, it is displayed larger, prettier and clearer, and if there are 2 or more photos (maximum 8 photos), they will be slightly smaller, with a gallery switch below them – so sometimes less is more.

Videos cannot be uploaded.
You can’t put a phone number in the ad text (there are crippling designs with differentiating signs – but they will be cleaned up by the moderator anyway, if not by the automation, and the number will look untidy) – it’s better to add a phone to the main photo or interest the buyer so that he wants to press the phone button and open your contact.
Links to websites cannot be posted (there are exceptions – you can specify the domain of your business website without a protocol and anyone with a computer can copy and open it in a new tab, but the link itself will not be clickable, although it will be useful as a brand mention for PR campaign purposes).
It’s better not to add emoticons – sometimes you miss something, and then the ad glitches so badly that it’s better without them. Special characters too. But no one forbids adding standard symbols with a certain indentation (space) – various minus signs, equals, exclamation marks – be creative.

Moderators don’t like captions on photos, but if they are concise or appropriate, sometimes even phone numbers on the main photo are allowed (especially those ads that are paid, with advertising, not free or without advertising for quantity). You can use a colored background for the phone number on the photo to make the number readable – a simple pencil will be enough for this design solution.

It is advisable to use ads that work well not only in the search on the OLX, but have already been indexed in Google search, not to change their name – so that the OLX saves the same address of the ad page (because it will rewrite and regenerate it) and it can even be strengthened with links (the easiest budget option that will not cost you anything is to share the ad page on social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter (X.com). It is relevant for a stable list of services or goods – and if you are selling used spare parts or devices and the placement of a specific model is temporary, then it is better to find cheaper links and add links to your business page on OLX, and not to ads – you can use inexpensive ones, but preferably anchor links (with text in the link), and definitely not Chinese or Indian ones, OLX is not a pity, although it will not be worse for it – you cannot use anything to promote your own business site, only bulletin boards.

I wouldn’t recommend importing goods in bulk here – make ads according to the methodology above and they will bring targeted traffic and orders, but uploading the same descriptions to another resource is a bit of a waste. And if that upload file is from your own site, then the content that was written for the site was stolen from you and instructed a fairly popular message board to spin it, thereby undermining your site

Some people get more views from a low price – when they indicate the price of a minimum service or product within the ad. But then the client is disappointed when he finds out that it’s only for the “tassel” and not the entire product – don’t do that, an honest price or even a strategy to offer the maximum package to stand out from the competition will play better on your side than a mini-deception.

Product ads that people have bookmarked, when the price is reduced not by a trifle, but by a normal amount, generate notifications to those who are interested in these products. With services, especially those with a high price tag, such games with the price tag will not look serious, unless it is a cheap mass service. Try to avoid discounts, because their presence says that you have nothing to offer the buyer except the price.

OLX is an experience that can be scaled to other message boards, including specialized (thematic) ones – practice here.

What can be ordered on Site 4 biz UA

Make a square icon from your logo
Order a banner from a designer (just write to us – we will select a designer depending on the task)
Create a profile for your contacts for you (fill in the SEO description of the business profile, set up everything) – standard hourly rateThis task will take about 30 minutes if you can already provide all the information about your business in a file, and longer if you need to find out everything from you to present it well on the Internet.
Placing individual ads for goods or services (basic photo editing in ads, writing effective ads and placing them, controlling the advertising functions of the account from the prepaid budget in the account) – monitoring and processing orders for you or your manager.
Upload the key pages of your profile on OLX with the following links (just do not edit the ad title so that OLX does not rewrite the ad’s html address).
Consultation on OLX., other message boards, marketplaces, or related internet marketing issues.

Why should a business be placed on OLX?

1. 1. Wide audience

OLX has a huge number of active users who regularly search for goods and services. This provides access to a wide base of potential customers.

2. The ability to test the market

The platform allows you to test the demand for new products or services without significant financial costs for marketing.

3. Availability and low cost

Classifieds are often cheaper than running ads on social media or search engines. There are free or low-cost packages for many categories.

4. Direct communication with customers

Through OLX chat or phone calls, you can communicate directly with customers, clarify order details, or give advice.

5. Local binding

OLX is popular with local buyers, making it ideal for businesses focused on local sales or services.

6. Easy to use

The platform’s interface allows you to quickly create ads, and convenient filters help your potential customers easily find your product or service.

7. Increase brand visibility

A regular presence on OLX allows you to constantly remind your audience about yourself and strengthen your brand image.

8. Possibility to sell leftovers or non-standard goods

OLX is suitable for quick sales of leftover goods or items that are difficult to sell through other channels. Test new solutions and get people interested in your new product.

9. Flexibility in promotion