Online classified marketplace Carousell has acquired OLX Philippines via a $56-million investment deal with tech investor Naspers, giving the OLX Group, its classifieds business arm, an approximate 10-percent stake in the Singapore firm.
The merger, which was launched on July 15, Monday, now forms a single platform under carousell.ph. Pushing artificial intelligence as the new frontier for the classifieds sector, Carousell also moves to introduce Classifieds 4.0, an AI-first concept that will simplify the selling/buying process on the platform to “reduce the time taken for users to sell a product—from 30 to only three seconds.”
Classifieds 1.0 utilized the print media, Classifieds 2.0 used the desktop Web while Classifieds 3.0 was mobile-first. With 4.0, AI will improve the personalized feed on the app based on a user’s past buying behavior and that of similar users, along with conversational commerce that features Siri-like search, chatbots and smart replies.
Further, AI will auto-fill the sellers’ listing fields such as category, title and even suggest a price based on other similar listings.
“Our founders were 2.0 users at first. They got frustrated and wanted something that was mobile-first, which was 3.0 that actually allowed users to snap a photo, add in a description and price in order to start selling their goods using their mobile phones. But now we’re thinking, ‘What’s next?’” said Raffy Montemayor, general manager of OLX Philippines who leads the transition of its customers to the new platform.
“We wanted to reimagine what classifieds should be. So we started investing in technologies that could make this happen,” he added.
He said the Philippines is the fastest-growing market for Carousell, specifically in very concentrated areas where people can easily meet for transactions.
As far as concerns over the application transition, Montemayor was quick to explain: “OLX users who didn’t consent to share their data openly under the Carousell platform no longer had access to their listings from July 15 onward because all traffic is now being redirected to Carousell.”
There will also be dedicated teams in place to understand patterns of fraud for the protection of users, complementing third-party Trust and Safety firm in checking what’s happening with other platforms to help create a safer environment.
Globally, the marketplace has quadrupled in volume since inception, with more than 196 million listings and 71 million items sold among 6 million monthly unique users as of 2019.
In growing its footprint in the property business arm in the Philippine market, Carousell, likewise, acquired Property24, a property search portal that is a subsidiary of Naspers, through the OLX merger.
“What really is the best benefit of all of these three brands coming together is we’re looking at combining the old uses of all of these three platform,” said Tina Bautista, head of the General Classifieds, Real Estate and Data and Analytics teams at Carousell Philippines and Property24.
She noted that the OLX audience has a very strong brand recall. With the addition of Carousell users to the e-commerce landscape, she projects a more diverse pool of listings and property offerings for the platform’s buyers and sellers.