Adepafie.com, Google Trader or even Tonaton.com are all housed in airy offices in Accra providing cutting-edge free classified online ads.
A trail of their free classified websites shows that the two most sought after cars on the secondary car market online are the Toyota Corolla and Camry models.
"Consumers have embraced free classifieds as a way to generate income by selling personal items, while others take advantage of the deals available online to get their first cars or trade it for another," said Peter Manu of the adepafie.com website.
To him, the growth in internet access and users making more regular and expensive purchases online meant the trend would continue.
His free classified portal has drawn a little more than four hundred ads since last year and claimed that several deals have been struck on his site.
Already, Tonaton.com is making a song and dance about its web traffic having surpassed others and boasting of attracting more than 101,000 classified ads since it entered the Ghanaian market in April this year.
Three of the five best selling cars right now on Tonaton.com for instance are Toyota, Nissan and Kia despite the massive influx of second-hand Hyundai and Honda cars into the country in the last couple of years.
Car garages in the two biggest cities, Accra and Kumasi, testify to an increased pressure on the used car market particularly the Toyota models, compared with last year.
Marketing Manager of Tonaton.com, Mr Kwabena Opoku-Boakye, said since the launch of the company in April this year, the website has been visited by over 2.4 million unique visitors, which confirms it as one of the fastest growing websites in Ghana.
He said the website’s foremost competitive advantage among others was that it had a customer support team in Ghana which manually reviewed all the ads that were posted on the site.
Toyota sales account for about 33 per cent of all the cars traded on the online classifieds market, followed by Nissan with 13 per cent.
Kia sales account for only seven per cent, while the top three cars on the market constitute almost 53 per cent of all the second-hand cars sold on the online classifieds market in Ghana.
What is even more interesting is that even though the average price of a Toyota is pegged at GH¢ 26,925 which is 17 per cent and 57 per cent more expensive than Nissan and Kia respectively per the listings on Tonaton.com, it is still the most patronised brand.
This underpins the robustness of the Toyota brand compared to the other car brands. “There is so much demand for Toyota models to stop prices from falling on the second-hand car market. It’s all about good value for money”, said Mr Yaw Kusi, a car dealer at Tesano in Accra.
Between June and November 2013, about 22,008 cars have been listed on Tonaton.com. 15,000 of these cars still remain active on the website with the rest having been sold.
Accra and Kumasi contribute about 82 per cent of the second hand-cars that are traded on the online classifieds market in Ghana.
For sure, the traditional advertising market may be in decline, but online classifieds are bucking the trend, according to the country Manager of Google, Ms Estelle Akofio-Sowah.
"Newspapers and radio has been the soft underbelly of the ad market," she says, "but I think television is now rather vulnerable."
“That is a significant milestone for the media market in the battle to win Ghanaian hearts, minds, eyeballs and of course advertisers,” Ms Akofio-Sowah said in an interview.
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The lure of online ads has always shown promise and would be a game changer in future media spending and is expected to outgun the traditional media.
One of Tonaton.com’s main features is the sorting of ads according to geographical areas and prices, allowing for easy browsing and location of goods and services at the consumer’s preferred price and area.
With this easy-to-use interface and hassle-free posting system, Tonaton.com has drawn more than 101,000 classified ads since it entered the Ghana market.
The value of these ads is estimated at GH¢ 10, 167, 666 million (US$ 4,374,514,648) which represents about 5.2 per cent of the country’s GDP, which is estimated at US$42.4 billion, according to the IMF.
