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
In terms of content. The Pindula Marketplace is stocked with a lot of products and services by multiple shops. Some of the shops are unverified and some are. It’s easy for shops and individuals to upload their services and products on the Pindula Marketplace and they also have a sale feature which you can use to put your products on sale. The feature has a period of sale which you chose for you listing to be on sale for. Let’s go to the verification process.
Verification process
To be verified on the Pindula Marketplace, all you need to do is to upload a picture of you ID card and also a picture of you holding the card. Below are images of the verification process.
Promoted Products
You can also boost your views but promoting your products on Pindula. One view currently costs $50 which means for $5000 you get 100 views on all Pindula platforms and also the TechZim site. For an additional $50 000 RTGS your listing will get posted on all Pindula WhatsApp groups for a day. See for yourself.
Conclusion
It’s a 10. The Pindula Marketplace works quite well for me and I noticed no bugs. They’re also a well known website which means your products and services will reach most parts of Zimbabwe.
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.
We now witness an interesting twist as the E-creator founder who was claimed to have fled with a million dollars gets caught by the ZRP. A week ago, E-creator posted the following statement informing it’s employees what had happened to their money.
After this the company shut down and took down all of it’s online platforms. I for one didn’t believe this story thinking that it was just a method of going away with everyone’s money. Many thought the same, I reckon. However there has been a sudden twist a week later as Zhao Jiatong is arrested by the ZRP. The police statement read:
With that said, what we can all do now is to just wait patiently and see if the guy has the money or not.
Online marketplaces have made their impact all across the nation as most who want to sell their products or services run to them. These stores are the best platforms to get your products or services to the whole of Zimbabwe for a very cheap price or even for free. In this article I’m going to list(ungraded) the top 5 marketplaces in ZImbabwe based on my personal touch.
This one is not just unique to ZImbabwe only but since we also utilize it here in ZImbabwe, there was no harm in me listing it.
The Facebook Marketplace only sells products and not services, which it’s greatest weakness but is also a great tool for those selling physical products. It’s greatest pro is that most prospective buyers are already on Facebook which means that the moment they look for something on Facebook they’ll see the seller’s add which increases the seller’s outreach. You can visit the Facebook Marketplace by clicking the Marketplace icon in your app or browser page. If you do not already own a Facebook account, you can sign up on facebook.com.
Pindula, which is a widely used online platform in Zimbabwe has a wide range of tools they have for you. The most notable features of their site are their blog, marketplace and job board, although they have other sections. The talk of the day, the marketplace is one of the most used marketplaces in the country which is mostly because of Pindula’s widely known name and also their zero-rated site. Yes, the Pindula site can be accessed without an internet connection which gives them an advantage over other marketplaces. The Pindula marketplace has various built-in categories of products and services and they also have a spotlight feature which places an ad for your product or service on most of their pages and also on the TechZim website. You can also get advertised in their fleet of whatsapp groups for a larger amount. One notable feature of the Pindula marketplace is the verified profile option as a seller is verified upon uploading their ID card and also their picture holding it. Click this link to be redirected to the Pindula marketplace page.
I’m sure you’ve come across their ad on platforms running google ads. This was the major reason that made me check it out. Tisitano is an app available on the Google Play Store, I’m not sure about the Apple App Store though. Tisitano supports both products and services and also offers an option for one to create a shop account which is separate from their original account just like the Pindula marketplace(my bad for forgetting to mention this in the Pindula section). This means that I can create a Tisitano account in my name Tinotenda and then create a shop and possibly name it Oliya Carpets. Tisitano also has a point service with which one can top up their account with points for them to be featured on the Tisitano front page. Apart from this everything else is free. You can download the app on the Google Play Store through this link.
These guys have been available for a long time for now. I can’t even remember when was the last time I began to know of this site but it was long ago. Classifieds might probably be the largest marketplace we have here in Zimbabwe. Their interface is very user friendly and so are those of the sites listed above. They also have a wide selection of categories for your products and services. Classifieds also has a featured ad service which is accessible after paying a small amount. Follow this link to access their site.
I just couldn’t go without mentioning this impressive emerging platform. ZimPoint is an online market which just joined the community but is already chilling with the big boys. The have both an app and a web interface which they’re constantly updating. The platform also has a WhatsApp group which is open to all members on weekends only for them to post their ads there. You can access their site using this link and download their app using the following button.
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.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 era in 2019 eLearning has boosted it’s outreach worldwide promoting more learning opportunities for students. Many softwares have sort of ‘replaced’ our traditional ways of learning and with the introduction of ChatGPT this has gotten better. Yes, it’s good for learners as it provides a wide range of information but this learning method doesn’t cover all the necessities particularly in our country. Those online learning platforms, bots and ChatGPT handles only provide the learning material which is good. But particularly for Zimbabwe, there are no past exam papers available on the internet. If you’ve looked for them you’ll understand where I’m coming from. This is where EduZone chips in. Eduzone is a WhatsApp bot specially made for online education for both primary and secondary education and it is 100% free, that too being available for all stages within the grade 1 – form 6 levels.
EduZone offers notes, question papers and marking schemes for Grade 7, O Level and A level students which are part of all these stages’ syllabuses. The bot also has a smart interaction system as users have to make their entries using links to their categories. This is where EduZone beats all the other eLearning platforms in Zimbabwe. As stated above, it has past exam papers and also their marking schemes and that’s basically every exam class student wants. And as we all know nothing is good completely, EduZone has got one flaw. The bot doesn’t have learning material for some levels. In my trial I discovered that there is no learning material for grades below grade 7 and also no learning material for O Level Computer Science and Biology.
EduZone is a really useful tool particularly for the exam classes. All they need to do is to add content to the subjects that have no learning materials.
Creating a full website with a custom domain name and taking it online is not a simple task but today I’m going to show you 2 different ways of creating a website which are quite simple. For starters, some words that are going to be mentioned in this article might be new to you or might be confusing but I assure you that after you’ve finished the process, you’ll understandthe jargon. First of all, there are 2 methods as I mentioned earlier are:
Blogger
WordPress
My personal favourite is WordPress and if you have guessed it right, it’s the CMS (Content Management System) I use for blog. Now before we talk about the CMS first we need to talk about the domain name.
Acquiring a domain name
This is the first step of the process and I’m going to walk you through it all. Since it’s about creating a website for free we’re going to be working with free domain names ( .tk .ga .gq .ml .cf ) but for those who are serious you can consider buying yourself a domain ( .co.zw .com .org .net .xyz .org.zw .ac.zw) and if you want to buy any one of these, I recommend Webzim and NivaCity for their cheap services.
Creating a Freenom account
The only free TLD (Top Level Domain) provider so far is Freenom. With Freenom getting a domain name is very easy but the hardest part is your account being able to get a domain. Now, I’ve seen some articles and YouTube videos that claim that if you use a United States address and zip code when registering your account it will work (haven’t tested it though). To create a Freenom account, follow this link to go to a US address generator and use the provided details to register your account on Freenom.
Acquiring a free TLD
Now that you have your Freenom account, go to this page to create your custom domain name. The trick there now is that if you want to use a .gq domain name, in the text box enter your desired custom domain name with it’s extension e.g sqeel.gq and it will automatically have a .gq domain placed in your cart cart. Continue with the checkout till you reach the point where you have finished making your domain name. And now that you now have your domain name, let’s get to the next step, choosing a hosting provider.
Choosing a hosting provider
There are tons of free hosting providers but I recommend InfinityFree and Freehosting. You might be wondering why I chose these two out of many hosting providers across the web. The two are some of the best free hosting providers on the market since they have flexible specs. They offer a reasonable amount of bandwidth and disk space and also have a softalicious app installer. Now you get it. Right?
Freehosting.com
I’m not going to talk about the plan’s overall specs, I’m just going to get straight to the point. Freehosting.com offers you 1GB of storage space and 10GB of bandwidth. The biggest disadvantage of using free hosting providers is that they don’t give you full DNS settings, and so does Freehosting.com. Freehosting.com also gives you the softalicious app installer which is used to install apps like WordPress. However freehosting.com doesn’t let you use a free domain with their service hence the only choice is InfinityFree.
InfinityFree
InfinityFree has a much more flexible UI compared to Freehosting.com and it also has better specs than Freehosting.com. InfinityFree gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth, however they have a few terms and conditions. They also have the softalicious app installer and a few DNS zones just like Freehosting.com. The best part about InfinityFree is that you can create an SSL certificate for your site which makes your site more secure and reliable by your audience (the one which shows a secure icon before the domain name in the address bar).
Had your choice?
If you’ve made up your mind, and you’ve made a choice on which hosting provider to choose, create an account for that provider (click here forInfinityFree and click here for Freehosting.com). To add your domain in either one of the providers, select the custom domain option during registration instead of the sub-domain option. Now to add your domain name to the hosting provider you’re going to receive 2 nameservers which are going to look like this (only for InfinityFree): ns1.epizy.com ns2.epizy.com
Now to insert these nameservers, login to your Freenom account and click ‘My domains’ and then ‘Manage domain’ for your custom domain name. Click ‘edit nameservers’ and click on ‘use custom nameservers’ and add the two nameservers with the first one on top and the second one at the bottom and click Save. You’re now done with adding the nameservers so go back to the registration page for your hosting provider and now add your domain. It might take up to 20 minutes for your domain name to be online and functioning. Hooray, your site is now online and running. Now to add the content we need the CMS I once mentioned earlier.
Blogger CMS
Being the simplest of all, blogger doesn’t have much settings and customisations to do like other Content Management Systems. To create a blogger account, go to blogger.com and create your blog. At this point you’ll have to use a subdomain that ends with .blogspot.com, which you will later change to your custom domain name. To add your custom domain name go to settings in your blogger dashboard and go to ‘custom domain’ now add your custom domain with the www prefix and you’ll get 2 CNAME records which consist of a name and a description. The first CNAME record always has the name www and the destination ghs.google.com but the second one is unique for your domain name. Copy these two CNAME records and login to your hosting account and navigate to the CNAME section and add these two CNAME records. This change can take up to 72 hours so please be patient. After you’ve added your domain, you’ve now successfully integrated your domain with blogger CMS. After integrating your domain name you now have to add a theme to your blog and there are dozens of them acrossthe internet. Now if you’ve chosen your desired template, go to the themes section and click on edit template and then restore and select your theme then it will be automatically uploaded. If the theme fails to install, open the theme in your notepad and copy the whole template by clicking CTRL + C and then click edit HTML in the blogger page and clear the HTML there by clicking CTRL + A then backspace then CTRL + V to paste. And you’re done, your site is now online with a beautiful theme and you can now start writing articles on your blog. Happy Blogging!
WordPress CMS
As I mentioned earlier, WordPress is my favourite CMS and also the one I use for this blog. Now to setup your WordPress account login to your CPanel and go to softalicious app installer. WordPress is always at the top of the list so click on install and select your desired installation parameters and then install your app. When your installation is done, you can go to your website admin dashboard by using the link yourdomainname.domain/wp-admin. Login with your admin details. Now to add a theme to your site go to the themes section then select your desired theme and activate it. You can also customize it depending on your preferences. And you’re done, your site is now online with a beautiful theme and you can now start writing articles on your blog. Happy Blogging!
Many people fancy blogging as a really hard task and also demotivate those with the potential of starting blogs. Sometimes this is because they see most people trying out blogging and then end up failing in a month or two. Failure to run a blog is mostly due to lack of information as beginners and also lack of commitment. Many bloggers give up after receiving a small amount of views or when their site is rejected by Google AdSense. This should not be a reason for one to stop running their site though. Personally when I came into this industry, that’s how it was for me. No views, AdSense denial and stuff but this never brought me down. So to those who want to start new blogs and also those who once failed and want to give it another try, I’ve got an article for ya’ll.
Steps to starting a successful blog:
Use a real domain name with a known TLD( e.g example.com or example.co.zw) instead of using a free subdomain (e.g example.wordpress.com or example.blogspot.com) and a free domain (e.g example.tk)
Optimise your site’s speed. For WordPress users you can do this by using cache plugins and optimisation plugins and also link your blog with CloudFlare CDN.
Create a social media handle for people to know you. I recommend Instagram as it is the fastest to grow on and also the most used locally.
Improve your google search appearance ( you can do this by adding your site to google search console)Share every new post on various social media platforms to market your content. I recommend having many WhatsApp and Facebook groups to have a large audience.
Avoid plagiarism when writing your articles. This is one of the biggest factors that’s stopping many bloggers in their way as most copy and paste other people’s articles on their sites and apart from copyright infringement this has many consequences including losing views.
Don’t rush to get your site on AdSense or Google News, you’ll only be rejected. For AdSense you need at least 60 articles of the same niche to get accepted. Avoid using pop-up ads and those annoying ads where some of them even have NSFW content.
Don’t use slang language when writing your articles, this makes the readers have no zeal when reading your articles and you end up losing audience.
Collaborate with other content creators on social media and produce something great.
Web hosting is an online service that makes your website’s content accessible on the internet. When you purchase a hosting plan, you are renting space on a physical server to store all the website’s files and data.
Web hosts provide the hosting technology and resources required for the effective and secure operation of your website. They are responsible for keeping the server up and running, implementing security measures, and ensuring that data such as texts, photos, and other files are transferred successfully to the visitors’ browsers.
In this article, you will learn what web hosting is, how it works, and what are the different types of web hosting available.
Explaining these types of web hosting services is a story for another day. Now after ths background on what web hosting is, let’s go onto the cheapest web hosting service in Zimbabwe.
NivaCity
NivaCity is a popular web hosting company which offers Cloud Hosting and VPS Hosting services. They are a South Africa based company who extended their outreach to Zimbabwe and made it possible for Zimbabweans to purchase their services using Paynow. Here in Zimbabwe the average price for the cheapest hosting plan for most web hosting providers is $3 which is quite cheap and affordable. However NivaCity managed to surpass that with their Direct Admin hosting plan going for $1.50. Now if you wanted to run a personal website or a project website which one would you choose? If my guess was right you would choose NivaCity. But let’s take a look at all of the plans they offer.
NivaCity’s shared hosting is divided into two groups. The first is cPanel web hosting and the second is Direct Admin web hosting.
cPanel web hosting
All of NivaCity’s sites are hosted on LiteSpeed servers hence speed is not a speciality for this hosting plan only. The cPanel hosting has 3 plans which are pretty much ideal for businesses and small websites. The plans are listed below.
If you’re someone who knows about the hosting services here in Zimbabwe, you would have noticed that their Direct Admin Deluxe Plan is almost the same price as other hosting providers’ Starter plans. So according to what I’ve come across lately, NivaCity has the cheapest hosting in Zimbabwe.
Private browsing is a privacy feature in some web browsers. When operating in such a mode, the browser creates a temporary session that is isolated from the browser’s main session and user data. Well it doesn’t matter what you’re doing in the private tab or incognito mode but there might come a scenario where you would want to take a screenshot. That’s absolutely fine, let’s take me as a good example. I run the Sqeel Blog using my admin account right, but on the other hand I wanna see what the fronded looks like or when I add certain changes I want to see them in the fronded so I create an incognito tab then login with my forum user account. Someone else would just open a different browser but for full time chrome lovers like me I know you understand the feeling of using a different browser. Now to take a screenshot in incognito mode, follow the steps below:
Alert
THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE SO THERE’S NO GUARANTEE THAT IT COULD WORK ON YOUR DEVICE BUT IT ALREADY WORKED ON TWO OF MY ANDROID DEVICES.
Go to chrome://flags
Search for Incognito screenshot
Click the button labeled ‘Default’
Click ‘enable’
Click ‘relaunch’
And you’re done, you’ve successfully enabled the Incognito screenshot option. To test this just open an incognito tab and attempt to take a screenshot.
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