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Online Trade in Ghana-A Growing Menace of Robbery?

Buy and Sell

 

One of the fastest and comfortable ways to trade is to do so online. It saves the time of walking to the supermarket, boutique, and other places to look out for items to purchase. With a computer and an internet connection, you can visit an online store, purchase a product, and get it delivered to you within a blink of an eye. What is more convenient than this?

It’s quite easy dealing with an online company directly. That case, you know who exactly you are dealing with. It becomes challenging when you find yourself on a web where you have to trade with a person anonymous to you—-classified websites.

Online trade is obviously gaining roots in Ghana. With sites like tonaton.com, olx.com.gh, and a few classified ad sites, you are sure to get what you need to buy online. Amid the above mentioned, you deal not directly with a company, but individuals. All you need to do is visit the site, search for what you want to buy, select it (whether brand new, slightly used, or heavily used), contact the owner via a mobile contact or e-mail provided, and finally arrange where to meet for the item(s).

Since you do not know each other in person, it will require some efforts on the part of the seller and buyer to put together some descriptions about yourselves in order to make out each other when you first meet in person. This can, at time, include revealing some of your vital personal information to an unknown person.

Even though, some have been able to build networks with people unknown to them, some on the other hand have suffered at the hands of these buyers and sellers. I have heard of many instances where either the seller or the buyer has been robbed…

According to a story by one guy, someone who wanted to buy his mobile phone scurried away with the phone in the long run. As he narrated his ordeal, he wanted to sell his mobile phone so he uploaded the photograph of the phone on the site (name withheld) as it is required.

Among the many responses he had, one of the prospective buyers asked to meet him somewhere for the money in exchange for the mobile phone. After meeting the person for the first time, the prospective buyer took the phone as if he was testing it. The next thing the seller realised was that the guy had run away with the mobile phone.

A friend of mine’s aunty suffered a similar thing when she was nearly robbed at gun-point in the process of selling her car. These are but a few of the stories I have come across in relation to online trade in Ghana.

With all these stories in mind, it leaves us to doubt the credibility of people we trade online via classified websites. Not only do the sellers raise the question of trustworthiness, but the potential buyers as well.

I do not know, as at now, any safety measures that have been put together to shield the identities of those involved. If security measures are not put in place, robbery cases will continue to emerge in the name of online trade.

As a Ghanaian, you can share with us some of the ways we can embark on to protect ourselves from these unknown people that we trade with online.



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