Mercador undergoes brand change. Becomes OLX

The popular classified ads website Mercador announced on Monday it will overhaul its brand image and become OLX.ro. Users that enter the website are announced via pop-up of the change and taken to a special page where the website team argues for the change.

The name OLX.ro comes from “online exchange.” The name and the logo of the website will change, but the rest- the team, the platform and services, the local character and the free classifieds- will remain the same, announced the company.

For a while, the two names will run in parallel to allow users to become accustomed to the new name. “We have been preparing for the rebranding process for several months, and the investment in rebranding is not over,” said Cristina Gheorghitoiu, business manager at Mercador.ro. She also said that at the moment, the investments in Mercador.ro far outweigh the revenues of the website.

Mercador.ro is owned by Allegro Group, which is part of South-African group Naspers. According to the team, Mercador needed to change since its not only available in Romania, but in over 100 other countries. Websites belonging to the Naspers Group in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Kazakhstan and Belarus will go through the rebranding process. On other markets such as South America, the OLX.ro brand has been present for several years.

OLX has offices in Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Delhi, Karachi, Lagos, Manilla, Nairobi, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo. OLX is part of Naspers group since 2010.

“We propose to learn from the OLX family and remain the best classified ads platform used by Romanians for Romanians”, according to the message on the announcement page.

The team also assures the users that posting ads and announcement will remain a free feature, all the user accounts will be transferred along with messages, private information and other features.

The announcements posted on Mercador.ro last year exceeded 1. 6 million, up 130 percent compared to 2012. Approximately 80 percent were posted by individual owners. Of the total number of posts, 365,865 were related to cars, motorcycles and boats, 256,068 were real estate deal proposals, 332,079 pertained to fashion and beauty items and services, 96,990 were from the parent & child category and 92,077 were sports and leisure announcements.

“Mercador.ro’s progress last year was due to active investments in brand promotion campaigns as well as platform optimization, which brought fast results for sellers. We have become the website with the highest number of announcements,” Cristina Gheorghitoiu, business manager at Mercador.ro, tells BR. Read an article in Business Review about online clasifieds websites in Romania.

A market survey conducted by GfK in November 2013 on a sample of 600 people found that Mercador.ro was the most mentioned website by Romanians. In terms of awareness, the platform was in third place, the same as in 2012, and the top classifieds website.

The number of unique visitors to the platform doubled during this time while the number of posts increased threefold.

Diana Petrescu, Otilia Haraga

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