“Adevinta Turned Kijiji Into a Pay-to-Fail Platform”

Subject I am following up because your previous response — or lack thereof — only reinforces my absolute disgust with Kijiji’s customer support and the astonishingly poor logic behind your advertising system. Let me be crystal clear: this is not a “misunderstanding.” This is a fundamental failure of design, disclosure, and basic respect for paying customers. It is now over eight hours since my ad was placed and paid for. According to your own metrics — as shown clearly in the attached screenshots — the ad has received zero page views. Not low engagement. Not poor performance. Zero. At the same time, another ad for the exact same vehicle, placed differently, has received hundreds of views. The contrast could not be more obvious. The reason, as your support casually admitted after my money was taken, is that WANTED / SWAP ads are filtered out and do not appear in the main browsing sections. That raises an unavoidable question: What possible logic justifies selling paid promotions for ads that your own system intentionally hides? Where — exactly — do you clearly and unambiguously explain before payment that certain ad types are functionally invisible? Where do you warn users that they may be paying for an ad that will never appear where buyers actually look? You don’t. Instead, Kijiji: Accepts payment upfront Applies hidden filters that destroy visibility Delivers zero exposure Then hides behind “that’s how it works” when challenged That is not a technical oversight. It is misleading by design. Since Adevinta took over, this platform has gone relentlessly downhill. What was once a usable marketplace is now an overpriced, over-filtered, poorly thought-out system that punishes users for trusting it. Every design choice seems engineered not to help sellers succeed, but to extract money first and deflect responsibility afterward. I am writing this at 3:00 AM because I am still angry — angry at wasting hours of my time, angry at being treated with contempt by support, and angry at realizing that Kijiji no longer values the people who actually fund the platform. Is your programming team truly unaware that filters which suppress ads also suppress page views — the very metric you sell promotions on? Or is the expectation that users simply won’t notice until it’s too late? Either explanation is unacceptable. This experience has made one thing very clear: Kijiji is no longer a serious marketplace. It is a cautionary tale. And I will continue to make that known publicly until this practice is either fixed or properly exposed. You should be ashamed of how this is being handled.