Driving Bazaraki.com's Triumph: An Interview with Managing Director Christos Kyliakoudis
Bazaraki.com, the leading online marketplace in Cyprus, has revolutionized the way buyers and sellers connect in the country. With a focus on simplicity, practicality, and user-friendliness, Bazaraki.com has become the go-to platform for individuals and businesses alike.
In our exclusive interview, Christos Kyliakoudis, the Managing Director of Bazaraki.com, sheds light on the factors driving their success, their commitment to supporting sellers, their plans for enhancing the user experience, and the notable trends observed in the Cypriot economy. Kyliakoudis explains Bazaraki's strong emphasis on the real estate category, bridging the gap between buyers and real estate agents, propelling them to the forefront of the market. He also delves into the marketplace's continuous innovation and incorporation of new technologies like AI.
Bazaraki.com came to the market at the right time with one simple goal! Connect buyers and sellers and make their interaction faster, simpler and safer! 16 years later, we believe that there is no other marketplace or platform in Cyprus putting the same effort and approach as we do!
We focus on this goal and take steps to achieve this every day. The main factors that contribute to making Bazaraki the No.1 marketplace in Cyprus are our continuous research for a simple, practical and user-friendly platform, our team, our mindset to learn fast, fail and succeed, our transparency and our approach towards both the buyer and the seller.
To measure our success, we focus on two factors. Firstly, we evaluate the number of daily listings in specific categories from our sellers. Secondly, we estimate the volume of interactions and leads generated by buyers, reflecting our marketplace's effectiveness.
The success of our sellers is linked to our success as well
Our team maintains a close day-to-day relationship with our business sellers, providing platform education and personalized consultations, customized proposals for each business and solutions on how they can grow their leads fast and quickly. At the same time, our private sellers can take advantage of our customer service team for all the necessary information and guidance they might need to list their products fast and efficiently.
Moreover, as Bazaraki, we run multiple online and offline marketing activities to expose our sellers' listings to the right audience both locally and internationally. At the same time, we continue developing our website with new features to help buyers connect with sellers faster.
The success of our sellers is linked to our success as well. As you can understand, we cannot run the platform without them, and their success has become one of our core values.
We are constantly introducing new features and services to improve the user experience. Currently, our primary focus is developing a new vertical approach for the real estate category, creating a better online experience for both users and real estate agents, which we hope that we will be able to share with you in the following months.
At the same time, user security remains one of our top priorities. Our moderation team is dedicated to running regular listing inspections to identify suspicious or fraudulent activities from sellers or buyers. Navigating through a safe platform is one of our most significant commitments. Therefore we take proactive measures both to block such individuals and keep our users informed on how to handle such situations.
AI is vital in enhancing the online experience, and we strongly recognize its importance. As a platform, we use AI tools to help list suggestions based on the user's search history while our software developers explore LLM AI. This algorithm uses learning techniques and extensive data to understand, summarize, generate, and predict new content.
With ongoing research and development, we are excited about AI's potential and positive impact on our users' overall marketplace experience. We want to use conversational AI in the future to discover somebody's perfect real estate instead of the traditional UI/UX.
Our goal is, and will remain, to help buyers find their dream properties
Real estate is our top priority and the most significant category on our platform, which placed us as the No1 Marketplace in Cyprus. Through the years, we managed to bridge the gap between buyers and real estate agents in a manner that was not applicable before.
There are several reasons why we emphasize it. Firstly, real estate is one of the most essential businesses in Cyprus, generating a turnover of around 8-10 billion per year despite the market's relatively small size. Secondly, we believe no other Cyprus platform/website/business supports this industry more.
As a brand, we focus our digital marketing campaigns mainly on this market. By doing so, our buyers are just a click away from their dream property! A great effort was made to target local and foreign people who are actively looking for properties in Cyprus, using all major digital tools. At this moment, the specific campaigns are generating massive traffic to our platform and helping our sellers achieve their targets faster! Our goal is, and will remain, to help buyers find their dream properties and assist sellers in reaching the right and broader audience.
Through our platform, we have noticed significant trends. Firstly, people are more open than ever to buying or selling used products through our classified categories.
Secondly, the real estate market currently favours smaller properties, driven by the demand for economic spaces, the general increase in real estate prices, the increase in raw materials, war, logistics etc. As a result, apartments are currently in higher demand, while houses are seeing a decrease. The most significant increase in prices has been noticed in the coastal properties of Limassol, Larnaca and Paphos due to several factors like the higher demand for investment opportunities that Cyprus has to offer, political and human crises that have started in East Europe (Russia-Ukraine) last year, Israel and the list may go on.
Lastly, the prices of used cars have also increased, mainly due to the logistics. At the same time, eco-friendly vehicles have become the most favourable due to increased petrol and local taxes on conservative cars. At Bazaraki.com, we keep trying to bring buyers and sellers together effectively, regardless of market trends.
