WhoGoBuy is not affiliated with Nairaland, but I am pleasantly surprised that the site is already populated with products for sale and quite well designed. It is easy to understand the interface, and practical to use - buyers won't need to make online payment. Instead, they will contact sellers through their mobile phone numbers and arrange to meet to exchange goods for money.

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Greetings!

Introducing; the online service Nigerians have been waiting for.

www.whogobuy.com the one stop point for all your buying and selling needs. Cars, phones, clothes, homes, books, games, you name it! All listed with descriptions, images, contact info and negotiable asking prices for your convenience.

WhoGoBuy is a virtual marketplace where businesses and individuals showcase their goods and services for other Nigerians to see absolutely free of charge.

* No need for Credit Cards
* No Online Payments required
* Find the BEST deals nearest to you FAST and EASY
* Negotiate with the sellers online or by phone
* Make a purchase at the sellers sales point or have them deliver to you
* Browse through hundreds of listings in many classified categories
* ...and lots more!

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The above information was sent to my e-mail address by 'mailman@whogobuy.com'. However, I am yet to find out the names of the people - or company - behind this site. What do you think?

I like the look, feel and security measure (as regard login restrictions). It is a simple and cool site with loads of items. Let's see how it grows sha.

I wonder what's been going down on enownow.com. I barely go there; it's not as much fun as i thought it would be.

not bad. not bad at all.

Abeg, who go buy me

Nice concept. More and more online trading platforms are springing up and that's good for Nigerians.

There is an online automobile trading platform available at www.timeautos.com - comes with up to six pictures of automobiles displayed and full seller information too.

The place dey ok, sha, plus it feels nigerian

it is nigerian .

any one with an idea who's behind the idea

very good site.

Good job

This is good. I like the no credit card/online payment idea. It reduces fraud intents. Call this the Nigerian ebay!!!.

Yeah the concept sounds good and if it works properly, truely may even be nija's ebay. Thats if fraudsters don't spoil the biz for them.

But seun who are those behind it sef.

@lioness

chic how much are u worth so we can start bidding?

great site, perfectly good for the Nigerian situation. but i wonder how they make money, via adverts or do they charge to link sellers and buyers? anyway i havent yet bothered to register. big ups to d owners sha.

Great medium for armed robbers to aim on thier victims...Nice idea though but how about arranging to meet a seller and he turns out to be a mugger or armed robber..

It's so easy! just

* Find what you need
* Contact the seller
* Negotiate
* Make your purchase

Well I don't know

Well as they say back home "Fu n ara ni brain"

hmm, seun i hope it is safe to acutally buy stuff from there, just the name whogobuy sends some kind of negative impressions but i don't know, that's probably just me being paranoid.
I'd have loved it if I had seen a top that says AFRICAN QUEEN on it. i was kind of hoping to see one on whogobuy.com but didn't .

oh wait! so the buyer & seller acutally have to meet? then i guess i'll just forget it. i didn't read that before. My bad!!!!

Hey Guys, I just joined this lovely forum to spread a little awareness about the company I work for "WhoGoBuy" let me just try to clear some things up:

We do not sell any items on WhoGoBuy but however provide a platform for
individuals and businesses (marked "B" on the site) to showcase their goods
and services to a market of Nigerians. It is up to the buyers and sellers to
make contact via the site, negotiate and do business without any
interference form us.

Yes, we are all aware of 419 and that's the good thing, the fact that we are "aware" thus Nigerians are generally cautious when it comes to online transactions. All this is thanks to so many stories of online fraud and it's rampancy among our people (though it extends way beyound just the internet, abi no bi so?). This is why at our company it was decided that online transactions and Nigeria are just not ready for each other yet. We basically provide information of sellers to buyers and vice versa, very similar to what you see in the papers so if you're not afraid of the papers then you have nothing to fear from WhoGoBuy.

Cheers.

Delinka,Nice one!!!..The platform's to showcase goods and services..abi?But my point's how can you tell the real seller to an armed robber.I could post online that ave got a car to sale and negotiate with a buyer and the unsuspecting buyer agreed to meet up to seal the deal and this is me waiting with my gang to rob him of his money.....It could work the other way sef

The site has refused to open for quite some time now, what's up?

I do not think it is a good setup if I will need to meet all the individual sellers if I needed to buy anything, what's the essence of the convenience promised in any online commerce?

The owners should please endeavour to keep the site online as mush as possible because I have tried to access the site for over 4 minutes now without success.

9jerians r trying O! 

Nice site, i like the look and feel. Wish you luck DELINKA!

The site is cool plus it's user friendly.

Afam abeg give 'em a break jo! The site is still new and judging from the looks and tech nature, they have put in a lot of effort in making sure it works right. I believe they must be doing some extra work.

As for the 419 issue, I'll give you a quote:
"The fear of failure is the key to failure itself"
I think they should put a way were users can comment on items and sellers or even rate 'em, this way we'll be able to tell who is real or phoney.

I hear you!!

can't figure. appears not to be working!

Our humblest apologies to our customers & friends.

Here's an update:
Early this morning our web host had a serious hardware failure and the WhoGoBuy site (among others were affected) we do have a current backup of the database however and thus when the issue is resolved we shall be back online.

Here's a copy of the correspondence we got from our web hosting company:

Site down

At 1:04 am Eastern time, Wednesday December 14, 2005 the Bleep web server experienced a hardware failure. Our CTO and technical staff have been working as fast as possible to resolve this issue and restore the server back to operation.

We sincerely apologize for the outage and unfortunately do not have an estimated time of recovery available yet. As soon as we do have the server back up and running or have more information on this outage we will notify you…

We apologise to our customers and friends and assure you to be up and running ASAP. We are also working on an alternative host in the case for such circumstances ever occurring again.

To address HalfIjebu's comment:

Delinka, Nice one!!!.. The platform's to showcase goods and services.. abi? But my point's how can you tell the real seller to an armed robber .I could post online that ave got a car to sale and  negotiate with a buyer and the unsuspecting buyer agreed to meet up to seal the deal and this is me waiting with my gang to rob him of his money. It could work the other way sef

Yes you are very right, but if you listen to yourself you will realize that just as you are concerned and cautious so are a lot of people out there, yes of course not everyone and we have a mass awareness campaign planned out. Since you have pointed out a major concern you could even be one of the best people to suggest ways to tackle the issue. Suggestions such as arrange meetings in a public place, send a friend, ask the seller to come to meet you, avoid offers that are too good to be true and so on would be very welcome at this point.

In Nigeria we face the challenge of fraud, 419, robbery and so on but let’s be honest, are these things common to Nigeria alone? There are lots of obstacles we have to face as a legitimate company trying to uplift Nigeria's image from where the 419'ers and the "Yahoo, yahoo's" (online fraudsters) have dragged us into. We welcome your criticisms and would appreciate your support as this is just one project that we envision pioneering many others to clean up Nigeria's marred image.

As Nigerians we need to learn to work together just like the Asians and Americans do it. We need to remove the frown from the face that hears "Hello, I'm a Nigerian" We shall continue to strive to make WhoGoBuy a service that will make our country proud, something to show the rest of the world that Nigerians are not all bad and that we are learning to work hand in hand for a greater tomorrow.

We would once again like to apologise for being offline and promise to bounce back stronger and more determined than ever to satisfy our users and keep the Nigerian flag flying HIGH!

Cheers, Delinka.

sad experience....I tried to log onto the site on Thursday, 15th, 2005 to no avail.

Somebody please advice them

There are actually ways of tackling these problems and you guys need to make people aware of measures taken to overcome the problem fraudsters on line and apart from building the public confidence,you need to set up a security team that sees to all negiotiations not for the interest of the people but the organisation as well...Im always here to help if required.

lioness i fit buy you put for my zoo, please send me you contact details so that i can arranged

Another "molue" website. can we be serious people.

demmy, that is a very ridiculous and unfair statement. Did you even bother to read what they said about their host being down? We are supposed to be nice people on Nairaland, not cyber-terrorists using careless words to destroy hardworking people.

Cyber-terrorist? well I don't know. All I know is that naija cyber history is fill with dead links and it wasn't the yours truly who brought them down. I was only speaking from experience. I support Nigerian presence on the web everywhere I come across one but majority are just not serious. Many are unaware of what it takes to properly put out and maintain a web site. While this particular case may indeed be due to some server error however for a supposed on-line business such prolong absence signal something else. Anyway I wish them good luck and happy recovery.

Thank you for your support guys

Here's an update:
Our server was restored yesterday evening (Thursday 15th) at about 5pm Nigerian time. All the files on the server were destroyed but fortunately we have backups of all the script files. Some of the user's item image files were lost however and will have to be re-uploaded by them but their data was not affected in any way.

Reconfiguring the server will take a little while as there are several settings that need to be adjusted by our technical crew but we should be fully operational by this afternoon (Friday 16th) with one or two new features on the site for the benefit of our users.

Our apologies once again for the mishap and thank you all for your criticisms, advice and support.

Cheers, Delinka.