In May 2018, a taxi driver seeking to own a car saw a Toyota Corolla being advertised for sale on a popular e-commerce platform (name withheld), at a considerably cheap price. He contacted the seller who introduced himself as a nurse at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital.
The two decided to meet at one of the Malls for test-drive, further negotiation and payment if both parties are satisfied.
Eventually, they met, everyone was satisfied and so the money was paid and the keys to the car handed over. However, the document to the car was not readily available. The owner said that he had locked it at the office and so they should drive to the facility so that he retrieves the document to the vehicle for him. When they arrived at Kole-Bu Hospital, the taxi driver while the seller went into the hospital to retrieve it.
Minutes later, he was called by the owner of the car to move towards the hospital building and meet him for the document. He left the car at the parking lot and moved as instructed. After waiting in vain at the entrance to the main hospital building without any sign of the seller arriving, he called his number only to get the feedback that the phone was off. After waiting for an extra couple of minutes, he decided to go to where the car was parked.
To his utter dismay, the car was nowhere to be found. Within an hour, he had lost his life savings to conmen with zero hope of retrieving it.
This is just but one of many negative encounters people have had in their quest to linkup up with sellers through the power of the internet.
Even though e-marketing has been very successful in Ghana over the past half-decade, negative stories and experience like this have discouraged countless people from participating in this 21st Century novelty.
To protect the Ghanaian buyer and also re-ignite the gradual decline in desire in e-commerce, Ghsell.com, an online e-commerce platform, a fully Ghanaian owned business has put in place measures to give buyers 100% security and safe trade.
To achieve this, the company plays a middleman role by delivering goods to buyers and go further to secure buyers by giving them 7 and 30 extra days to test used and new products respectively and return them for their cash if items are found to be below standard.
This initiative is not only a game-changer but a challenge thrown at other competitors to follow-up
The beautiful story about GHsell.com is that it is the brainchild of young creative Ghanaians who have come together to champion an online trade that is distinctively Ghanaian and one that is responsive to the Ghanaian context.
For a country with poor identification systems to trace individuals, the initiative has effectively taken away the threat of dealing with strangers.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with this reporter, Sir Laud Aikins Oduro, head of the group indicated that “Initially, GHsell.com wanted to do online marketing business in Ghana with the goal of just a platform where people can sell and buy items from the comfort of their homes”
“However, it emerged that consumers were highly exposed to fraudsters and so we decided to re-engineer GHsell.com with the consumers’ safety at heart and make deliveries of items bought on our platforms to consumers all over the country and that was our breakthrough,” recalled C.E.O of GHsell.com,
He revealed that the site currently sees an average of fifty thousand (50,000) daily visits and astronomical rise in subscription, feats he believes are largely attributable to the safety trading policies integrated into the platform’s functions.
He indicated that the target of the company is to be recognised as the most credible, safest and convenient e-commerce platform in Africa.
“Users of GHsells.com have access to a wide range of products needed for their daily use. Automobile, Land and Housing Properties, Electronic Devices, Food, Agricultural inputs, Machinery and Clothing, you name it. We believe that the market has great potentials and we are ready to invest to drive this growth to the very peak,” he said.
He called on the people of Ghana to support the initiative by doing business on the platform because it is the only way indigenous businesses can compete and create more employment for the ever-growing unemployed graduates in the country.
He called on the youth to be relentless in the pursuit of their dreams and never allow the challenges derail them because hard work put into productive ventures always payoff.
He concluded with these words: “to anyone who has suffered one form of heartbreak or the other, to those who have vowed never to get involved in online trade, GHsell.com is here to serve all your buying and selling needs, we are responsible for everything you buy and so it is impossible to have such negative encounters”
GHsell.com is the only e-commerce platform that offers buyers the opportunity to return products that do not meet their standard functioning ability for their money.
By: Isaac Kyei Andoh/awakenewsonline.com
