Online shopping is considered an easy and time saving thing. That is why it is growing day by day around the globe. In Pakistan thousands of websites are providing each and every kind of items, one can think of. From clothes to cellphones and from household items to kids toys, everything is available with just one click. Most of the online shopping sites give the option of payment on delivery. Which makes it easy for the buyers to pay money after checking the product. When it comes to online shopping one website that ruled this domain in Pakistan is OLX Pakistan.
This website is known for sale and exchange of new and used items of every kind in reasonable prices. You need to buy or sell a mobile phone a laptop or a car or furniture just give an online free advertisement or look for an advertisement and you are done. The reason behind olx success was the reasonable prices and genuine sellers and buyers. But from the last few years the quality of items on olx has gone down. Mostly the shopkeepers and brokers are selling and buying items on high prices and low quality. Some cases of frauds and armed robberies have also being reported. Though the olx Pakistan website mentions on each and every advertisement it publishes, that never meet a buyer or a seller other than public places and never send cash or an item in advance, but still this disclaimer or caution is not enough.
One of my friend last year was selling his laptop, he received a call from sadiqabad, the caller introduced himself as an officer of armed forces, after few phone calls the person requested him to courier the laptop from a bus service and told him that as soon as my friend send him the builty number he will transfer the amount in his bank account. After reaching the terminal my friend called him and sent him the builty number, upon which the person said that payment will be transferred in few minutes. But it did not come and the bus was about to move when my friend on getting suspicious about the person, cancelled the cargo. After an hour that scammer called my friend and strangely somehow he knew that builty was cancelled, he tried to convince my friend that he was having a trouble in transferring the money and now if my friend can go to meet his cousin in islamabad, he will get the instant payment, of course my friend refused that and told him that if he recieved any call from him again, he will lodge a complain with the police department and he never received the call from that scammer.
But that incident exposed the strong network of scammers and indicated that few employees of a reputed cargo service were also involved. In recent days there have been different reports regarding a group of scammers who are giving very low prices for high end smartphones and buyers thinking that it is a good chance to grab a high end smartphone in low price, transfer money in advance and after that rather they are sent a chinese copy of a phone or a seller switch off his phone. Then there is another kind of fraud, usually faulty laptops and cellphones are sold and the common buyer without realizing the fault buy them.
OLX Pakistan needs to come up with new ideas of protecting online shoppers on their website and needs to introduce some checks so no one can sell defective products. Reason why people use olx is that they think it will save their time and money and gives them the good quality item.So dear olx Pakistan have a check on brokers and shopkeepers as mostly their products are below the average and expensuve too. It is the high time that olx Pakistan should listen and fix the complaints of the buyers and sellers or else soon olx Pakistan is going to lose its large share of online business in Pakistan.
