I used to think that one could sell virtually anything on OLX, at least based on a promo that ran some time back on "everything sells". Well, I came to learn that not everything sells on OLX - at least not absolutely everything.

First, there are some products one would like to buy but you won't find them on OLX, not because OLX won't approve of their sale, but just because sellers have not thought it wise to put them up on OLX. Take for example an ingredient I needed to manufacture a unique product for in-house freshness, I couldn't find it anywhere online, let alone OLX. Basically, industrial chemicals/products are hardly or not sold on OLX.

But that's not exactly what I wanted to highlight with "not everything sells on OLX" piece. My interest today are those items that OLX won't allow you to sell, not even if you wanted to pay for the sale. Take for example sales of guns and other weapons - can you sell a gun using an anonymous name?

Instructions on how OLX moderates posting on the site were sent to us and as the following information:

How moderation works
? They allow ads within reason to go on the site. These ads
have title, description, price and photo as well as an ad, they remove excesses i.e. the illegal, the forbidden, poor quality, and the offensive language.

?  Each ad is scrutinized to ensure ad quality in terms of ad title, description, appropriate image, correct pricing before the ad is activated.

Although part of the instruction says that moderators are keen to detail, I have seen an ad where the advertiser talked of 42 enches screen instead of 42 inches - and the ad was still approved. This is an area that OLX should take keen interest on to improve the quality of ads on the site. But to test whether they actually check on the sales of the forbidden items and ads with offensive language, I created an ad for a shotgun - I'll update this article if it gets approved.

So I have talked about guns as one of the forbidden items on OLX. The others they won't allow you to sell are Alcohol to avoid selling to minors, drug prescriptions as most probably you are not a qualified physician, counterfeit software (okay I need to do more research on how they verify this), sexual content e.g. sex toys (I don't know why those are illegal), financial services, endangered species and their body parts, human body parts (if you want to buy kidneys, OLX is not the place to go), and of course they won't allow you to sell your nuisance baby through human trafficking.

In addition to those, anything that is illegal in Kenya e.g. hard drugs can't be sold via the site. So if you were planning to make a quick sale of an illegal item via OLX, sorry, try elsewhere.