It was only a matter of time. Telecom’s online shopping mall is closing. It just goes to show that just cause you are an ISP with a bunch of money to throw around and have a few spare techies to develop a nice web site – you don’t know everything there is about doing business online. Plenty of people questioned Telecom’s motives when Ferrit started up. Did I use it? – nup. The few times I ended up there, only to get referred to the suppliers site meant Ferrit just acted as an annoying and unnecessary inter-loper. Assuming I had gone there direct, the only reason I would have done so is in the vague hope that they would have been able to show me the full range of suppliers of a particular product – which Ferrit didn’t. I also found the ads annoying after a while.
Perhaps they should have focused their efforts first on building a compelling service that they could sell to suppliers/advertisers and then build the traffic from there rather than the other way around. It looked like this is what they were doing – ie advertise to build traffic, so you can use that to get suppliers to use Ferrit to sell their products. In most of the categories the number of retailers are limited, which kind of defeats the purpose for me. Even if they had done a good job, it still didn’t answer the question of why Telecom was doing it at all. Core business indeed.
