I am sure that picture made you cringe. This post is gonna assume the reason for this rather annoying-to-the-customer phenomenon.
Lets take this conversation to Kantamanto, cast your mind back when you wanted to buy a belt do you see how when you ask for the price of a belt the seller pauses for about a second? as though he was swallowing a snake then after blurt out and say a price that looks like it were taking fashion tips from your guy. Do this roadside test, buy a cutlass (yeah that is hawked in Ghana) or a pair of sun glasses on the street while driving first a high end car, then go back but now with a low end car, probably even trotro (the public bus) i will bet you the same product will have more than one price and if you had the time to delve a little deeper the trend in price quotes.
I am sure you have a hint of where i am going with this. Now back to the expression “inbox me for the price” that used to and even sometimes now makes the rounds on P2P online social media sales. I have had the experience very often and now if you are regular social media user it must be a daily pain. Take a scroll on many e-commerce businesses on instagram, that expression is written in almost all the captions either explicitly or implicitly, they put a very nice clothing and don’t say anything about price, their own way of “luring the buyer into the shop” i will tell you this, if your instagram profile screams of i wear nice stuff, i have celebs following me, i eat at the nice places chances are you will be given a price that befits you, however if your profile is modest and of lowly character you have already either started the bargain or just put the seller off.
To prove this i went on to instagram looked up one of the big selling and popular products on social media (instagram to be specific) compared 2 big (based on their following and post engagement) industry players on the same platform both of them had boldly written their prices on the product boldly with confidence but interesting enough those two businesses are fully established and known, not from here i realized this is dm thing is for people who mostly don’t have a physical location for their business, little responsibility, no backlash, anonymous. in-fact when the money is received by the merchant they can actually decide not to send you the product and well how are you gonna find them
, There are 4 reasons, well lets say 5 this happens or this is the culture
People are dishonest with product or service price: In most parts of Africa you have to strike a hard bargain on almost everything and we the people love a good bargain (it leaves you being either the cheat or cheated) when you are given a price of say ¢50 for a knockoff pair of sunglasses on the oxford street you can confidently bargain for about 70% off to about ¢10 to ¢15.
It is a culture (the way of life) of the people: Many Ghanaians would rather buy meat from the local market just because a smile or how nice i relate to the butcher may earn me an extra kilo. Personal relationships matter when doing business here. Dress how you want to be addressed only this one is dress how you want to be valued. people are personable in Africa, how do you think we got the name hospitable?
They want to swindle you: sometime its just the grim old greed that smiles you in the face. many businesses want to make supernormal profits from their products, let me describe a typical run on the average roadside or even now social media table top business person. He finds a product in need he finds a plug to the product whether quality or a resemblant knockoff at say ¢20 he puts a 100% margin on it then sells it, a classic case in point would be the “Ghana, face-shield fiasco” (i will write on it in my next post)
Fear of competition: many roadside businesses are afraid of competition, and the only kind of competition they’re afraid of is the competition of price hence why we don’t worry much about customer service, “well you can go to the next guy he will sell it to you at a higher price and you will come back”. Bet you’ve heard the akan phrase “menka nkyere obiaa” to wit, don’t tell anyone. That can only make sense if it’s a custom price and he is either giving you at too cheap a price or too expensive that no other ear can hear about his/her folly or yours.
Just to benefit off the Instagram algorithm: well, as noted by Dina Nour a Content Writer at Code95″…the Instagram feed algorithm is altered from the original chronological feed to an engagement-based feed. That means that when an Instagram post receives lots of likes, comments, saves, shares, DMs or any other kind of interaction, it is more likely to show up on your feed because Instagram considers it a high-quality engaging post that people want to see. According to Instagram, The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” This drives small business owners to ask followers to “DM” for additional info, price, link to order and other product related inquiries. These kinds of replies on your comment lead you to the brand’s inbox. For the brand, that means more people in their messages, more opportunities to build relationships with their followers as well as increase the likeliness of their post showing up on their feeds.
When i pondered over this very interesting phenomenon i thought hard about the number of times i had been given a too-good-a-deal-moment, I just laughed. Now bring that thinking to why startups are very cagey as to how much they’ve raised in funding or even to talk about anything that has to do with their financials hehehehe, good luck!
I love Ghana
God bless Ghana
