Divar — Ad Posting Optimization
Research Mentor · Marketplace UX · Drop-off Reduction
29%
Cited Fees as Challenge
1 in 4
Photo Quality Issue
14
Survey Questions
5
Research Themes
Overview
Why do experienced Divar users abandon the ad-posting process, and how can form redesign reduce drop-off? Research on Iran's largest C2C marketplace.
Challenge
Three structural product failures: (1) Pricing opacity — 29% of active sellers cite posting fees as the primary abandonment trigger, revealed only after the listing is complete; (2) Photo quality barrier — 1 in 4 sellers identify photo quality as their biggest challenge, despite Divar offering zero in-app editing tools; (3) Bundle selling workaround — users independently invented the practice of creating single listings for multiple items to avoid per-item fees, revealing a fundamental mismatch between product assumptions and real seller behavior.
Impact & Results
Delivered the first structured behavioral analysis of Divar's ad-posting drop-off, surfacing workarounds invisible to standard analytics. The bundle-selling finding — a user-invented behavior not anticipated by the product team — illustrates how ethnographic observation reveals design debt that A/B testing cannot. Competitive analysis across eBay, OLX, and Instagram Marketplace identified three highest-impact intervention points: transparent upfront pricing, integrated photo editing, and multi-item listing support.
Approach & Methodology
Mixed methods on a real, high-scale product: (1) 14-question survey with active Divar sellers — quantitative baseline on drop-off triggers and workaround behaviors; (2) Qualitative interviews deepening the 'why' behind each quantitative signal; (3) Behavioral observation documenting the bundle-selling workaround — undetectable through surveys alone; (4) Competitive analysis across eBay, OLX, and Instagram Marketplace; (5) Affinity diagram → 5 structural themes; (6) Evidence-based feature recommendations prioritized by impact and implementation feasibility.
Key Takeaways
The most valuable research finding is never what users say — it is what they do instead. The bundle-selling behavior was not a feature request: it was a workaround, and workarounds are the most precise signal of design debt. Form redesign without addressing the underlying fee structure and photo quality gap would have optimized the wrong layer of the problem entirely.
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