Work / OLX
On OLX, every deal goes through the chat between buyer and seller. When one of them stops replying, the sale dies. After a round of interviews, we asked the people on the chat page directly, and 16,902 of them answered.
OLX is one of Brazil's largest online marketplaces. I was a designer on the chat team, the place where buyers and sellers meet and negotiate. Chats left without an answer were one of the team's biggest problems: no reply, no deal.
We started with qualitative interviews to hear the reasons in people's own words. Then we turned those reasons into a short poll on the chat page, to see how much each one weighed.
Have you ever stopped replying to someone on OLX? Why?
79.8% said they never stop replying. But in the interviews, we had seen many people leave chats unanswered without even noticing. So we looked closely at the ones who admitted it, and split them by role and by region.
Main reason, among people who said they had stopped replying
The lowball offer led by far: 25.6% of sellers stopped replying because of it. Many took it as an insult. Next came buyers who stalled, and missing notifications.
The offer barely mattered. Buyers stopped replying when the other person was stalling (20.8%), when they forgot, or when they had already closed with someone else.
The open answers repeated the same pains: questions the ad already answered, offers that ignored the price, chats lost in a long list, and not knowing the buyer lived in another state. 44% said they prefer people who get to the point, and in São Paulo, the biggest base, scams were the top reason to go quiet.
On the chat team, I later designed photo and video sharing, tabs and favorites in the chat.
People stopped replying when the conversation felt like a waste of time, or unsafe.
Asking 16,902 people turned a vague metric, unanswered chats, into a list of problems the team could design for.