Online markets, especially for gadgets, electronic equipments, mobiles have become very much popular in Pakistan. People now prefer visiting these places online to buy products of their choice, than to wander in market.
Choose the product, call the number given with the ad and you are ready to go. But what if the ad poster has (intentionally) given the wrong number?
Yes it has happened with my friend, and I am sure that others would have faced the issue as well. There are famous online portals where you can easily place ads for the product you want to sell.
There are some roguish ones who just use such services for the sake of fun or revenge, may be. There are numerous examples of fake ads with wrong numbers. People usually use it to get someone irritated by the huge amount of requests from the buyers for the specific product.
Imagine if you put an ad for iPhone 4 in Rs. 35,000 with some wrong number. People will really go after that madly, and hundreds of interested buyers may end up calling the number, causing serious problems for the reciever.
This post is just to give few simple suggestions to such online portals to overcome such issues which is going severe these days.
Suggestion 1:
Yes, verify the number before the ads go online, a simple and easy solution which is not difficult to put into practice. Whenever you post an ad, you are to verify the number which you are going to use with that. A small code can be sent to the number for the sake of verification.
Suggestion 2:
Another critical issue which needs to be discussed is, placing mobile numbers on website in text form. Search engine bots as well as scripts can easily gather numbers from such site which may be used for other purpose such as mobile advertisement.
Hafeezcentre.pk has recently coped up the issue by showing numbers in the image form which are not readable by search engine bots. Moreover you cannot simply copy paste such numbers manually, easily.
These measures, if taken, will surely add ease to the life of many and surely a stitch in time saves nine while delay is the deadliest form of denial.
Thank you ProPakistani for advices.
Something not relevant here, but just Hafeez Center just reminded me of it, when I place my ad on OLX, 2 days later, I received a call from a buyer that he called with respect to the advertisement on Hafeez Center, when I did a search on my ad on Hafeez Center, my ad was placed there, with all the details copied from OLX!
Yes, leeching is a trouble in PK. e.g. things out of ProPakistai get leeched all of the time to appear on different portals.
This is an ‘internet fault’. You are generally unable to judge the original source of the content because it is replecated so many times for cheap traffic and false search engine placements.
Really good suggestions and all such websites must have this type of verification mechanism…In fact govt should take a step (sop) and ensure that all such sites working in Pakistan have good verification mechanism… otherwise there will be huge mess of such portals and then it will be much difficult to get such things implemented…
Getting the government involved will probably start with them requiring bloggers and site owners to “register” themselves with the government.
Interesting Fj.
thnx for advice
Very Good suggestions, Online Marketing website should follow those advise!
it is so annoying, when you call someone from the Online ADD and he response “O Pa Je Ki gal kar raye ho” ?
The biggest issue of Pakistan in Online Market is lack of awareness of people regarding internet. Millions of people in Pakistan only use internet for fun and entertainment for same reason growing internet shopping is not successful. There is no prior payment system available in Pakistan like PayPal our community feel uncomfortable to do shopping and pay anything online
Every website is trying to give save solution to customers. so your suggestion are very helpful.
hellodunya.com is using these technique for about 1 year. some other website are using these technique give reliable service.
Yes ! thare is no solution for online payment i think govt should be aware to make a solution easy peisa is alternate…
As a Hosting company we put our number to site.
we also have suggestion by user that we use business number like 0800 00000 etc but i think given personal number build closer relation b/w buyer and us
nice suggestions. i will consider for my next positive campaign
AOA, Well if you are talking about the classifieds ads portal in Pakistan or all over the world, There are always so many issues like fake ads, abusive ads, duplicates and so on. I have used Al-Hafeez Centre the shopping malls official site olx and other Pakistani ads portal but never help full. Recently a friend of mine told me that hes soled his stuff on hafeezcentre.pk within a day i was pretty shocked never expected that kinda response of a Pakistani site so i visited hafeezcentre.pk and i am really very impressed with the work done by hafeezcentre.pk team. Sold my stuff within 2-3 days. What we are expecting now is the same solution in all other portals. Thankyou propakistani for searching the good with the others.