I caught wind of a page on Multiply.com called Sundry Online that sells a plethora of products from cosmetics, bags, household items and sexual enhancers. It was the typical amateurish merchant website you would see on Multiply — sparkly logo, badly lighted pictures, words in ALL CAPS followed by exclamation marks (!!!) But what caught my attention was their headline:
Want to have a 4-DIGIT VANITY NUMBER to advertise your products? Only PHP5,600/yr!!!
Yes, what they’re offering makes it possible for you to use text messaging as a marketing business tool just like what you see every so often on television shows and commercials. From my email conversations with them, they say that they are in fact legit. They courted the big telecoms (Globe Telecom, Smart and Sun Cellular) for two years before they were given the green light. What is nice is they are primarily targetting small and medium enterprises (SME’s) and so-called “micropreneurs” or home-based entrepreneurs. This allows small businesses to expand their marketing strategy by holding mobile polls, raffles and advertisements. Their packages start at just P5,600 (~$100) annually. Quite a bargain. Each text sent by the consumer costs P2.50.
Now, when I emailed them again, I said that I was particularly interested (which I really am) in making actual money out of their service as a content provider. They said that aside from the 4-digit mobile numbers, they also offer mobile content management where one can sell their content (such as Java games, horoscopes, movie schedules and whatnot) via SMS. You can also hold text voting and share profit with them if it reaches a certain volume of response.
If only Sundry Online can come up with a decent website to make them at the least believable, I think that their mobile products will be a big hit. But for now, I find it tough for anyone to sift through the noise on their website and make a sound business decision at the same time.
On the web: Sundry Online
how about sending them a link to this entry ? or better yet, send them to me so that I could do the dirty work 😉
hi there! this is the GM of Sundry Online Shop and i really find your comment helpful. I guess you are not a regular visitor of our online shop which clearly means that you are not aware of the developments that happened through our years in e-commerce.
if you visit our online shop (www.sundryonlineshop.com.ph), we have redesigned it adding several features coming from the wish list of our regular customers worldwide.
to give you an overview, the online shop initially targets the middle class market, which finds too sophisticated site a threat hence the design followed a tiangge approach.
again, we encourage remarks, good or bad, from our customers hence there were several designs published through the years which are in fact, as mentioned earlier, wish lists of our customers because we always treat our customers requests a high priority.
furthermore, (i guess you won’t mind this long comment and the need to post it by batch), i guess what you have visited would be our backup site, in which we are currently updating as well.
in addition, if you did receive our remark re your inquiry about our 4-Digit Mobile Access Gateway Hosting Service, Sundry Online Shop is technically a part of an I.T. business, Diversed Solutions Co. The site of this specific business is still for enhancement as well.
The service is being offered to SMEs and micropreneurs to allow these people to promote their products and services to almost close to 38M mobile subscribers.
To reiterate, it is being offered as another form of advertisement and gaining profit from it is just an icing on the cake, as the saying goes. To use the technology for profit-advantage then i guess, making our site design as the benchmark for being a legit business is a little harsh knowing that we are indeed a registered business to date, offering concrete products and services, either from the retail/consumer product side or the IT area of the business unlike the type of business model that this specific site follows. To gain profit from the surfers through technology-based integration.
Anyway, as mentioned, we welcome good or bad remarks, i hope that our new site (www.sundryonlineshop.com.ph) would somehow be acceptable according to your standard. If you have time, please visit http://www.mydiversifiedsolutions.com about a month from now (it’s still under renovation, just to warn you) to see our IT related products and services that might interest you. We will be posting our current list of clients that belongs to the top 5,000 corporations in the Philippines, i guess that is the best benchmark coming from the business point of view. 😉
Anyway, thanks for the advertisement here since i just checked the traffic today and found that this writeup became one of the top 5 entry point of our site for this week alone. 🙂 I guess, the flood of inquiries came from this site as well. Thank you and may God Bless you in all your endeavor. 🙂
A 4 digit phone number in the western world would cost such an insane amount of cash.