The Pindula Marketplace, which is a part of the famous Pindula Group. The Pindula website itself is stocked with a variety of options, they have a news page, a job board, a marketplace and much much more. We just can’t list all that’s available on the Pindula website. 

Design

In terms of design, Pindula killed it. Their website is very responsive and has an easy to use interface. They also upgraded to a modern design a while back although their old one was not bad at all, it was just simple.  The site is also very fast even on slow networks. Here’s the Google Pagespeed test:

To see the detailed information, click on the image and zoom in. Below are both desktop and mobile screenshots of the marketplace.

Content

Verification process

Promoted Products

So I once wrote an article, E-commerce in Zimbabwe: The top 5. This article was only limited to 5 marketplace websites and didn’t give much information on those 5 websites. Because of this I’m conducting a long term review session for these E-commerce platforms. Each day there’s going to be a new marketplace to review for the next 20 days for me. In addition to that I’ll be updating this post everyday, inserting links of the review posts each one by one in their chronological order. So if you have a marketplace you want me to review, feel free to contact me through the contract form on this site. 

List of E-commerce platforms reviewed

The sudden shut down of the prominent e-commerce platform E-creator takes the whole of Zimbabwe by storm as many people lose hundreds of United States dollars through the Ponzi scheme. E-creator Zimbabwe rose to fame in March this year as the company was believed to be an easy way to earn money. 

On some point of view, it was but all this was too good to be true. As you might have heard, E-creator had multiple tiers for its employees and each tier had it’s minimum amount of money to be kept in the employees account for them to remain in that tier. In other words, one had to deposit $100 – $500 into their account for them to be in the VIP2 tier and this means that if you withdrew some of your money and was left with $99 you would go back to the VIP1 tier with less commission. So it meant that the more money you have in your account, the more you will earn through commissions. This was E-creator’s best move as people didn’t want to withdraw their investments for their money to grow even more and this led to vast loses for many. I for one wasn’t an E-creator employee and honestly speaking, even though I doubted E-creator’s legitimacy since day one, I almost joined the platform one day but stumbled upon an article by Techzim titled ‘E-creator – this criminal enterprise is running a scam, stay away‘ and so I stayed away.

The Zhao Jiatong story

Everyone in Zimbabwe has probably heard this name by now. Yes, Zhao Jiatong is the E-creator ‘founder’ who allegedly took all of E-creators’ employees’ money. Personally I don’t believe this Jiatong story. As of now, his name was never mentioned by the E-creator team and no-one knew anything about his existence until the point when E-creator issued the following statement.

How can a person deposit 1 million USD into his EcoCash account? This was the first question that came into my mind. I also received answers that my doubts were correct when I read the following article by Techzim:

If we consider the EcoCash story they are spinning, we are left scratching our heads. See, there are transaction limits when using EcoCash USD wallets. One can only send or withdraw a maximum of $500 per transaction and one can only have four such transactions per month. So, you cannot withdraw more than $2,000 per month.

The statement above says Zhao sent ‘company funds’ to his personal EcoCash account and then proceeded to withdraw it. Well, he could not withdraw more than $2,000 a month and so he would have needed over 41 years to withdraw a million dollars.

The statement says he also sent money to EcoCash agents so that they could withdraw on his behalf. The EcoCash transaction limits we talked about affect transfers too. You cannot send more than $2,000 a month.

You know what’s even crazier, you cannot hold more than $20,000 in your EcoCash wallet. This may change in the future but currently, you cannot. So, how could Zhao embezzle a million using EcoCash when it can’t? It’s all a web of lies coming from E-creator.

As it was clearly stated, you need over 41 years to withdraw 1 million dollars. So how did Zhao manage to do it in a few days. E-creator is yet to answer.