It is the first africast of February and we’re here with a rather weird topic in the form of secondhand classifieds, as one of the biggest names in the country – OLX South Africa – quietly and surprisingly shut down.
Before that we’re talking about popular online retailer OneDayOnly which has opened up a new subsite that only sells household essentials. Aside from the move being against the entire gimmick of the site, it’s also not ideal for customers with items sold in bulk and no free delivery.
Next up is India which is proposing new taxes and regulations surrounding cryptocurrency. Nothing is official yet, but we already have our doubts about any government getting a secure handle on an entire system based on anonymity.
Finally for news it’s Facebook’s parent company Meta which is seeing no growth, likely because of new privacy options given to iOS users in a recent update. With Facebook pushing hard for the Metaverse it seems the rest of the core business is not doing as well.
Returning to our main topic this week and the South African version of OLX mysteriously shuttered. The speed at which it happened, and the lack of communication to users, had some worrying it was a mistake of some sort, but we have received official word that it was intended.
Many people on places like Twitter have expressed some sadness at this closure but, as we will discuss in the episode, there was more places than ever to buy and sell secondhand.
Mentioned in this africast:
