October 27, 2010 by Albert Njoku
www.whitedrum.com is a new entrant to the highly competitive classified adverts market in Nigeria. There are already a few big players in this area as seen on this earlier post. Initially focused on the Nigerian and UK markets, Whitedrum.com is a product of Deltek Solutions UK and Deltek Solutions Nigeria (two different companies). The motivation for the launch could be summarised in this quote from an email I received from the CEO, Dele Oluwole:
Nigeria is highly populated and we think the good people of Nigeria deserve much more than the classified advert websites we are seeing around today, so we have put in the best of our resources to come out with whitedrum. There are still many more web applications for the Nigerian online market in the pipeline. Our plan for the future is to become a globally preferred classified website as we have long-term plans for countries like Ireland, Canada, Ghana, Australia, etc.
Users can either log on to the Nigerian or UK version of the website via a menu option at the top left corner of the site. Adverts are then filtered accordingly. The Nigerian version groups adverts by the States and it was easy to locate information. Advert posting is free and users can upload up to 4 photos. Youtube videos are also allowed. Users have a private dashboard from where they can manage their adverts. At the moment, there are not much adverts since the site just launched.
Did I find any major problems on the site? Not really. There was no functional error as I was able to register, search for and find adverts easily. The only problem facing Deltek Solutions is how to raise awareness about the existence of the website. To this end, I saw they have implemented sharing options for facebook, twitter etc. The site's focus on the UK market as well means contending against industry giants like Loot, Gumtree and a myriad other small sites occupying smaller percentages of the market.
I was a bit overwhelmed by the many colours and graphics though. I kept wondering how this would affect speed. Given that adverts already would contain pictures, additional graphics decoration could come at the expense of speed of execution. I thought this but the site seemed to run pretty fast. (Why does every Nigerian website have to have massive shades of green everywhere?)
Another impressive addition was a geo-location feature for each advert showing the ad poster's location on a map. I have not seen this on any other of the Nigerian advert websites. Additional reassurance for would be buyers of advertised goods maybe :)
