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.
