ikman.lk offers free ad listings, special promos to help sellers navigate COVID-19 challenges

Sri Lanka’s largest online marketplace for buyers and sellers ikman.lk has announced special ad listings and promotions for sellers, as means of facilitating them cope with their marketing challenges amidst the post-COVID-19 financial volatility. 

Accordingly, ikman.lk now offers free ad listing on over 50 categories across furniture, electronics, laptop, mobile, pets, musical instruments and miscellaneous. 

Elaborating on the move, ikman.lk Marketplace Director Shabir Deen stated that there are 3,000+ businesses already operating shops on the platform and the brand envisages to be more than just a marketplace by taking up the social cause of building the local community. 

“We believe that the removal of listing fee on ikman.lk would help all small scale businesses and private sellers to revive their livelihood severely impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also invite new sellers to join our platform absolutely free of charge and start earning an extra income,” says Shabir. 

Furthermore, those wanting to declutter their houses through online garage sales can now take advantage of the free ad slots allocations introduced by ikman.lk to selected categories.

Accordingly, electronics, home and garden, hobby/sports/kids, food and agriculture, fashion/health/beauty categories have been allocated four free ad listings per month per individual while animals and essentials categories get two free listings and education one listing free of charge. As per this change, the sellers only have to pay for additional listings upon exceeding the free allocation. 

Meanwhile the Urgent Bundle is a new promotion type exclusively offered to all free ad posters at a concessionary rate of only Rs. 250. 

This promotion lets the sellers indicate the urgency of their sale through an ‘urgent’ tag attached to the post. The idea behind this promo type is to gain an immediate response that leads to a faster sale. 

The package covers three days of advertising with visibility at the top of the ad details page. 

The ad will also show up on Similar Ads and provide seller analytics such as number of leads and views on the ad performance page. 

As a value addition, the sellers using free ads with Urgent Bundle have been given access to analytics on their iOS apps while this was previously made available only for the web.