The past year was one that brought one of the worst economic turmoils to Sri Lanka. Inflation reached a record high, and the cost of living rose to a new height. There were times when we could not source basic essentials. Queues in supermarkets, fuel stations, and power cuts are things we did not ask for but had to endure.
ikman strived hard to help its patrons navigate the economic crisis by introducing easy-to-use functions and more. Let’s look back at the highlights of 2022 and early 2023, including how the people of Sri Lanka engaged with ikman – the largest online marketplace in Sri Lanka.
Selling your vehicle for Free on ikman
We announced that anyone can sell any vehicle for free on ikman. Cars, bikes, tuk-tuks, heavy-duty vehicles – you can place your ad for free on our platform. This helped many new users find buyers through our ad portal and get great deals for their vehicles.
Selling your car at the market rate
During the early stages of the economic crisis, prices rose quickly. Apart from everyday products, it was difficult to know whether you were getting a good deal when buying or selling.
ikman introduced a price suggestion tool to help sellers price their cars according to the market rate. With the use of the data, we analyze and suggest a price range according to the model, brand, and year of manufacture.
At the moment this tool is only available for cars, but we will soon be rolling out this feature to other categories as well.
Log in to ikman with your phone number and OTP
An update allowed users to access the ikman website and mobile app using their mobile numbers. This made life easy for ikman users as they will be sent an OTP code after entering their mobile number. All you need to do is enter the one-time passcode to access your member account.
New users can sign-up using their mobile phones. Existing users can update their sign-in option.
Image share on the ikman chat box
Our latest update is the ability to share images between the buyer and seller within our portal. Before this, users had to migrate to another medium to share images about their product for better demonstration. Lucky for our buyers and sellers, that’s not the case anymore!
This also means that buyers and sellers now have the option to share images of important documents such as warranty cards and licenses in the ikman chat itself. This cuts down unnecessary travel just to find out that things are not right. However, ikman still advises users to meet and check a product before making the purchase, especially if it is a high-value product.
ikman user statistics in 2022
Let’s look at the numbers that show how users across Sri Lanka engaged with the ikman portal in the year 2022:
- We recorded 1 million ikman app downloads on Android and 220k+ ikman app downloads on iOS during 2022.
- On both iOS and Android devices, the ikman mobile app was installed in 100k+ mobile devices on average.
- ikman had 40.5 million unique website visitors in 2022, with an average unique monthly footfall of 3.7 million.
- Ads on the ikman platform have been stronger than ever before, with an average of more than 300,000 new ads every month.
