‘Bolee’ stops talking?
Bolee is a popular online auction portal of Pakistan (or it was?). The portal advertised itself as the first online auction site of Pakistan and did get much hullabaloo. The site was abuzz with activity in its initial days and managed to get significant registered users.
Unfortunately, same is not the case right now. A friend joking told me that “Bolee ki bolti band ho gaye” and when I visited their portal I came to know what he meant. The Web site looks like a dead horse. Items are lying in the bidding list for more than a year but have got no bids. Even the recent items for sale have failed to get any bidders.
Another issue – the major one – is that one can’t open the details of items for sale as the site is suffering from database engine error. Add to this the overall dull and unfriendly GUI of the portal and the equation is balanced. Bolee has got thousands of items on sale/bidding but I guess the buyers/sellers have moved to other sites like Lootmaar, Nilaam or b4bid due to ‘excellent’ performance of this portal.
I have failed to understand why the management is running this dead horse and from where are they getting their revenues.? Some users are also adding their bids oblivious of the fact that those will not be materialized on that site.
P.S. Next in line in our auction sites reviews is Nilaam. We’re planning to extract some information about their performance and will post it as soon as possible. By the way, the site came under heavy discussion a few months back.
5:16 pm
Saad,
I think it was a case of bad timing. IIRC, Bolee was (just) a side project started by Nexlinx, the ISP around 6-7 years ago.
I remember them trying to promote it at a couple of conventions in those days, but I guess the market was not ripe for them as the internet/broadband was not as widely available as it is now (I remember a 2MB line used to cost 30,000$ per month).
It was developed in-house by them, so, unlike Nilaam etc. they didn’t have a lot of investment involved and probably lost interest and abandoned it after looking at the response (Just a theory, you can probably contact Nexlinx to get an official update)
6:26 pm
We really need to find good UI developers in Pakistan.. seriously.. universities should start offering HCI courses to these developers..
9:27 pm
i don’t think of the auction website in pakistan is making a significant revenue.
people in pakistan are not yet ready to go to auction websites i believe.
7:56 am
i wish u people would talk to people instead of arguing this is stupid