OLX India has solidified its position as one of the fastest-growing networks for buying and selling services and goods—from mobile, cars bikes, electronics, real estate, furniture, electronics and many more product categories. Our journey from a global platform to a locally-driven powerhouse has been challenging & transformative at the same time. In this blog, we will share our story, our challenges and our learning from the year 2024.

Let’s Start with the Impact in 2024

In 2024, OLX India continued to redefine how users interact, buy, and sell online, achieving remarkable milestones that showcase our platform’s reach and impact:

Empowering Users Across India

• Total Fresh Listings: A staggering over 37 million new Listings were added in 2024.
  • Top Categories Driving Growth:
    • Mobile: Dominated with over 7 Million listings.
    • Cars: Accelerated growth with over 4 Million listings.
    • Bikes: Rolled in strong with over 3 Million listings.
  • Top States Leading the Charge:
    • Uttar Pradesh: Led the way with over 4 Million fresh listings.
    • Maharashtra: Followed closely with over 3.5 Million listings.
    • Tamil Nadu: Secured third place with over 2.5 Million listings.

Enabling Conversations and Transactions

• Total Messages Exchanged: A remarkable over 2.4 Billion messages between buyers and sellers—highlighting the trust and engagement within our ecosystem.
• Conversations Initiated (Calls + Chats): Over 576 Million conversations were sparked on our platform.

Enhancing User Experience

• Total Fresh Listing Images: Over 190 Million images were added for Fresh listings in 2024.
• New Users Onboarded: More than 24 million new users joined the OLX family, marking a significant leap in user growth.

Keeping the Platform Safe

• Fraud Account Banned: In 2024, Over 2.72 million fraudulent accounts were banned, of which 87% were proactively banned before any user reports by our Proactive Fraud Detection Systems.
• Verified Sellers: Over 85,000 sellers completed KYC, ensuring credibility and safety for buyers.

These numbers reflect our unwavering commitment to empowering users with a seamless, trustworthy, and engaging platform. From individuals listing items to businesses reaching customers, OLX India has become an essential part of millions of lives.

Now it’s time for The OLX India Story

The Global Origins

Founded as part of the OLX Group, OLX became a key player in the global classifieds space. In 2010, Naspers, a multinational internet group with investments in leading companies worldwide, acquired OLX and fueled its growth on a global scale. For over a decade, OLX thrived as part of this ecosystem, combining global expertise with local relevance.

The India Transition

The year 2023 marked a pivotal moment in OLX India’s history. With Naspers exiting, OLX India operations were fully acquired by CarTrade Tech Group, an Indian leader in vehicle transactions and classifieds. This acquisition included both the classifieds platform and the car transactions business, cementing OLX India’s focus on being truly local.

Rising to the Challenge

Migration for such a huge distributed platform was no easy feat. It brought unique challenges—from de-merging over a mesh of distributed microservices, and migration of cloud services & third-party vendors to building capabilities from scratch—all while maintaining platform stability, zero downtime and scaling operations to meet growing demands.

The Journey So Far…

Migration: From OLX Group to OLX India

This year, we took on significant challenges as part of our transformation journey:

• De-Merging 180+ Services: We untangled a complex web of distributed microservices to make OLX India fully independent and functional.
• Migration of Infrastructure: We migrated our complete infrastructure from the OLX Group AWS account to the OLX India AWS account without any downtime or impact on customer experience.
• Building In-House Platforms from Scratch:
  • Media Server: Highly scalable and dynamic Media Provider.
  • Data Analytics Platform: Providing deep insights.
  • Payment Gateway Integration Service: Simplifying payment gateway integrations.
  • Application Logging Pipeline: Removing third-party dependencies for platform logging.
• Migration of Third-Party Tools.
• Domain Migration: Ensuring a seamless transition for our users.

Platform Stability

Delivering a stable platform was a key focus this year, and we introduced several initiatives to enhance user experience:

• Real-Time Traffic Dashboarding:
  • Monitoring platform usage in real-time to provide deep insights.
  • We created multiple dashboards for different user journeys providing real-time insights into the platform’s health and performance.
• Enhanced Observability & Alerting:
  • Ensuring quick incident response
  • We create a robust alerting mechanism with Terraform, adding custom alerts based on major business flows and application metrics.
  • We added alerts on more than 80 microservices across classified platforms.
• App Vitals & Performance Monitoring: Keeping user satisfaction at the core.
• Heatmaps & User Journey Analytics: Integrate tools for understanding user behaviour via the Application HeatMaps & User Journey to find gaps and improve sections.

Cost Optimization

In 2024, we achieved significant cost savings while boosting efficiency:

• Reduced infrastructure costs by ~30%.
  • Migration to Spot Instance for stateless components.
  • Resizing Infrastructure components to more precise sizes.
  • Optimising resource utilization with monitoring & application-level enhancements.
  • Restructuring complex application flows to improve cost efficiency.
  • Optimisation of Seach System to provide higher efficiency at lower cost.
  • Rewrite Legacy Services to modern technologies for better cost efficiency.
• Onboarded new vendors for better efficiency.
• Built In-House capabilities to reduce dependencies and licensing costs.
• Adopted New Technologies like ClickHouse for logging, delivering powerful results.
• Optimized Service Architectures to save costs and improve performance.

Key Tech Initiatives

This year saw the launch of several groundbreaking initiatives:

• Launching Tech Blog:
  • We launched tech.olx.in launched, receiving 13K+ views, 5.5K+ unique readers.
  • Published 6 insightful blogs on 6 different topics.
• Cosmos Launch:
  • A powerful In-House Ad and User moderation tool.
  • Build with Event-Based Microservice Architecture, Leveraging advanced AWS tools for cost efficiency and performance.
  • Improved moderation and search capabilities.
  • Providing Simplified troubleshooting processes.
  • Facilitates the development of new features and AI algorithms.
• Launching New Image Moderation Model:
  • Implementation for enhanced detection ads with inappropriate images.
• A/B Testing Framework: Empowering data-driven decision-making.
• Rewriting Legacy Services: Modernizing for scalability and performance.
• Logging Platform:
  • Transitioned Logging from NewRelic to ClickHouse providing use huge cost savings and great performance in log analysis.
• Event House: Our in-house analytics platform is built with innovative event collection design.
• Kotlin MultiPlatform Mobile (KMP): Enhancing app development efficiency.

The Team

Our Tech Team comprises approximately 60+ individuals spanning various roles, including Backend Engineers, Android Engineers, iOS Engineers, PWA Engineers, DevOps, Testing Engineers, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and Engineering Managers. Details about the tech stack can be found here.

In 2024:

• Welcomed 25 Full-Time Employees.
• Hired 14 Interns from Campus Hiring Drives, future tech stars in the making.
• Conducted Training Boot Camp to accelerate learning and quality-driven practices.

We also introduced frameworks to foster growth:

• Hiring Competency Matrix.
• Career Ladder with clear progression paths.
• Training & Learning Pathways to upskill our teams.

Events at OLX

We celebrated our achievements and engaged with the tech community through:

• Tech Hackathon: Driving innovation.
  • 24 Hours, 8 Teams, 8 Innovative Ideas, 8 Prototypes And a Lot of Learning & Fun.
• Technology Day: Showcasing our tech journey.
  • 7 Tech Talks, 14+ Speakers, and a lot for knowledge sharing and learning.
• Google Cloud Conference: Showcasing OLX Innovations to industry leaders. Link to the Presentation: here.
• Technology Team Outing: Strengthening Team Bonds.

Learnings From 2024

2024 was a year of challenges, learning and growth, and we embraced these principles:

• Be Frugal: Achieving more with less.
• Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Adapting swiftly.
• Stay Adaptable: Responding to challenges head-on.
• Continuous Delivery: Building iteratively.
• Continuous Improvement: Never settle for less.

What’s Next? 🚀

As we gear up for 2025, our roadmap is ambitious:

• Leverage AI for Excellence.
• Improving Ad Posting Flows.
• Deliver Lightning-Fast Search.
• Expand Platform Capabilities.

2024 was a remarkable year, and we couldn’t have achieved all this without the incredible dedication of our team and the trust of our users. Here’s to an even brighter 2025!