Telenor WebLounge – An Insecure Ecommerce Portal

Couple of weeks ago, Telenor introduced this online portal, called Telenor WebLounge to buy Telenor Postpaid Numbers (of your choice in case of availability) – through Credit Card.

Indeed a great work that Telenor did, as service is very smooth and easy to use for getting a Persona PostPaid connection, even without visiting a service center of Telenor franchise.

We had given an introduction and How to Do of this service here.

In this post, we will try to point out things, where Telenor could do better.

• Induction of Credit Card has placed Telenor to target a very narrow audience, here is the reason – you all know that very little amount of Pakistanis hold Credit Cards. Telenor could avoid Credit Card thingy, or could leave it at customers’ choice to select between Credit Card or Cash on Delivery (COD) method. We have seen, Zong capturing huge market just because of COD procedure.
• Product Demonstration, given by Product Manager of this service, I just got a feeling that Debit Cards could also be accepted as a medium of making payment. If it was possible, this could have given more people an opportunity to buy Persona Numbers, while being at home.
• Telenor added a very attractive feature of selecting a number, with your preferences. You can ask the system to get you a list of numbers with your defined prefix or suffix (Such as numbers starting with 4444 or ending with 1111). This is absolutely fabulous method to get a premium number, that too of your choice.
• This service is available in only 10 cities of Pakistan, meaning that SIM Pack delivery is only possible if you are in one of these 10 cities. However, system never prompts you even if you are not in one of these 10 cities in the beginning. It just notifies you about in-availability of service,  in the last step when you give delivery address. This is somewhat unprofessional, and wastes time of those who were never eligible for the service.
• Credit Card information, along with other private details are transferred through insecure pages, meaning that without SSL. Concerns about this flaw were raised by me during the product demonstration, and project manager had asked for a month and half for the resolution of issue. Again, I guess installing an SSL should not take more than few hours, and cost merely 10$ a month – but service is still running in non-SSL mode for last 10 days.By the way, you may know that data or information traveling without SSL is considered insecure, as it can be intercepted anywhere in between webserver and client’s system (for instance at ISP level). It is strictly advised to not to input Credit Card information on non-SSL Pages. For more information about SSL and recommendations check this link

Bloggers, including some of my friends had an impression that Telenor was apparently in hurry for launching this service, especially in a situation when they decided to go even without SSL. During presentation it was told that company took almost two years for development of the product. However, a tweet on twitter revealed that maybe Telenor developed the whole application in lot lesser amount of time, and in hurry!

Maybe, Zong’s online portal, with almost similar capabilities (except buying online) was in pipeline, and Telenor wanted to beat it. Rest is obvious from above tweets!

In next part we will review the other section of Telenor’s WebLounge, that can help you posted with live updated of your mobile number usage, detail, history, billing and so on!