The horizontal classified platform cuts across almost all categories ranging from real estate to cars to jobs to services and everything in between. The Internet today is helping users to buy, sell and post ads a lot more easily than newspapers. When online, the users can compare a variety of products before they buy one, advertise a lot more on their products when they want to sell. Hence, there is a huge business opportunity in starting a classified platform online when the user demand is so high.
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Spotting Opportunity
Quickr.com wanted to provide something to the users that is faster, better and cheaper. “See normally you can get two of these things at a time, you can get something faster and better but it won’t be cheap or you can get it better and cheap but it won’t be fast,” says Pranay Chulet, CEO, Quickr.com A classified ad in a newspaper today is expensive and small businesses cannot really afford to place anything beyond a 5-line ad given their constricted budget. But online, all of this comes for free. “There is nothing cheaper than free,” says Pranay. He also adds that Quickr’s main focus was on providing a clean and simple experience to the users. “The way the classified market was when we started - there was a lot of noise in the market. There were quite a number of websites but they didn’t have good quality content or didn’t provide a very good user experience. So a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking just because they can put up a website and they are running a classified business,” Pranay explains.
There are a lot of players in the market today who grew fast initially but eventually failed to maintain the momentum in the long run. In a bid to increase the traffic and revenues they ended up cluttering their platform so much so that it is difficult for the user to make a clear distinction between content and advertisement. “If you start an online classified only, it is not a profitable business today. You have to focus on business to consumer traffic and not just consumer to consumer traffic. Hence we made changes in our business model to suit market needs,” says Satya Prabhakar, CEO, Sulekha.com
Identifying Customer Needs
What customers want today is to be able to close transactions quickly, hence it becomes very important to provide the requisite technical extensions on the website which will help connect buyers and users better. The success of an online classifieds depends on the quality of content that pops up and the response rates. For example, Quickr provides the user a free complimentary SMS with a copy of any response to the ads that a user posts. That way the users do not have to continually check their emails or log into the website to check for responses.
Opportunities in the future
With the advent of internet services on mobile phones, it has opened a lot of ground for online classifieds to expand their platforms. “It is clear that cellphones are a big medium. We have already launched a mobile site and getting users to get acquainted with it. If we crack the mobile medium, we hope our users would double and triple in the coming years
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