Sell WooCommerce products on OLX

A WooCommerce shop already holds everything an OLX advert needs: title, description, price, photos and stock. The work is in moving it across and keeping it true. This guide shows the manual way, the automatic way and what to prepare for either.

Can I list WooCommerce products on OLX automatically?

The Partner API is OLX’s official interface for programs, and it is the only supported way to publish without typing. If you want the background, read the OLX Partner API explained for shop owners.

What is the manual way, and where does it hurt?

Typing an advert on OLX takes a few minutes: choose a category, fill in condition and size, upload photos, write a description that does not break OLX’s rules. For ten products that is fine. For two hundred it is a week of work, and every price or stock change in the shop is a second job on OLX.

The risk is also quiet. A sold-out item that stays online brings messages and disappointed buyers. A price that was changed in the shop but not on OLX is a small lie that you tell every day.

What does OLX need that WooCommerce does not have?

A WooCommerce product and an OLX advert are not the same thing. Four differences cause most of the work:

• Categories. OLX accepts adverts only in the last level of its category tree, the leaf categories. Your shop categories have to be matched to those.
• Fields. Many OLX categories ask for condition, size, colour or brand, and some of them accept only values from OLX’s own list.
• Contact and place. An advert needs a city and a contact. The phone number belongs in the contact field, not in the text.
• Text rules. OLX does not allow e-mail addresses, web addresses or phone numbers in the title or description. The listing rules checklist has the full list.

A good integration does this matching once and then reuses it for every product.

How does the automatic way work?

An integration does four things:

1. Connects your OLX account with an application that you register yourself on the OLX developer portal of your country.
2. Maps your shop categories and product fields to OLX’s categories and fields.
3. Publishes the adverts you chose, one after another, with a pause between them.
4. Keeps them true: it takes an advert down when stock runs out and reads the status of your adverts back from OLX.

What should I prepare?

• An OLX account that you sell from. The portals do not say whether a business account is required; shops normally sell with one.
• A developer app on the OLX portal of your country. OLX approves each app by hand and publishes no waiting time, so do this first. The steps are in how to register an OLX developer app.
• Product data that OLX accepts: a clear title, a description of its own without contact details, photos and a price.
• A decision about categories: which of your categories belongs where on OLX.

How do I start without risk?

Start small and look at the result before you scale.

1. Keep dry-run on. Every advert is built and logged, and nothing is sent.
2. Open the preview of three products from different categories. It shows the exact title, description, price, photos, category and fields that would be sent, and lists what is missing.
3. Publish three or four adverts, open them on OLX as a buyer would, then take one down and put it back.
4. Only then run bigger batches. Tidelist sends at most 30 per batch, one at a time, and you confirm each batch by typing PUBLISH.

A tool that cannot show you the advert before it exists, or that publishes everything at once, is not one to trust with a live account.

What happens after the adverts are live?

Selling is the half that people forget. When an item sells out, is unpublished, trashed or deleted in the shop, its advert should come down. Tidelist deactivates it, never deletes it, so the advert can come back when the item does. It also reads the status of your adverts every six hours, so a limited advert or one that waits for payment does not go unnoticed. Keeping stock in sync explains the rules in more detail.

Which countries does it cover?

Tidelist connects to OLX in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. All six use the same Partner API. Bulgaria is the only country tested with a real account. The other five are beta: start with a few adverts and check them on OLX. See WooCommerce to OLX for the table.

Where does Tidelist fit?

Tidelist is a WordPress plugin built for exactly this job. Dry-run is on when you install it, nothing is published without you typing PUBLISH, and it never buys anything on OLX. The free plugin covers one shop and one OLX account, with no limit on the number of adverts. Pro adds automatic updates, automatic re-listing, price rules and alerts; see pricing.

Ready to try it? Get started with Tidelist takes you from installation to the first advert. Tidelist is not affiliated with OLX Group.