In an Interview with The News Nigeria, a popular local news site, Lola Masha, OLX Nigeria country manager said, “I think the best way to gauge our market share right now is to look at our competitor. Of course, we acquired Tradestable Nigeria platform, which means we are here to stay. In terms of specific share, we have significant market share, Compared to our competitors. I think number two now would be jiji.com.” That’s not the only issue though, OLX is also struggling to clean its name after the alleged OLX Nanny saga. According to reports, a Lagos family contracted one Mary Akinloye as a nanny after they found her profile on the OLX platform and she ended up kidnapping its 3 kids. Masha’s work at hand is to convice people to use the platform even with such reports. Her duty is to educate the public how the platform works and how OLX like any other market is open for everyone to post or buy from anyone and it doesn’t own any inventory and neither does it have any partnership with the sellers on the platform. “Trust is definitely one big challenge,” Masha adds, “In all the 40 different countries that OLX is operating, Nigeria is the one exception where this question is actually so prominent. When we launched the business in Nigeria, we knew about the perception that here you can’t trust anybody. But then we decided not to get involved in the assumption or to bug out courtesy of the negative stereotype about the market. We said ‘let’s launch and see if Nigerians are actually trustworthy or not.’ But what we learnt painfully and unfortunately is that we do have that problem here. It is a reality. But again, it is very unique to Nigeria. We don’t see this extent of trust and safety issue elsewhere.” Masha says that 99 per cent of all cases that go wrong are were users paid advance so the firm is educatingusers on how to use online classifieds by not paying in advance and making sure they meet the seller in a secure place and as well go with company just in case anything goes wrong. “Consequently, trust is a top priority for us. We are taking the issue very seriously. We are open to innovative ideas and can test new things that will help to build trust and safety,” she says. OLX Nigeria says it has a team working around the clock to review all the ads and ensure they meet its safety criteria and as well has features to allow users to report fraud or submit their complaints. Last year October, OLX Kenya launched Kaa Ridho (take pre-caution) campaign focused on user safety. Read the entire interview here.
