Shaadi.com, the lonely heart’s club arm of the People Group, has tied up with Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) to launch the ‘Shaadi.com on Vodafone’ matrimonial service via mobile. The service is exclusive to Vodafone currently and is available via a link on Vodafone Live!, Voice and SMS via 57007. The cost of each profile and an ‘Expression of Interest’ (EOI) via the Vodafone Live! service is Rs 10 a pop. Voice charges are at Rs 6/min for browsing and Rs 10/min for connecting to a listed user. SMS is Rs 3/SMS and profile views and EOI are Rs 10/SMS.
The voice and SMS service mark Shaadi’s second attempt at going offline following the launch of the Shaadi Active with Dish TV on DTH. I tried out the voice service and found it to be highly ineffective. After entering the required details in for a bride, the data which was fetched was both incomplete and more importantly, of no help. While I understand the efficiences Shaadi perceives in porting data to other platforms, findability and navigation are a major issue. I doubt many people will go beyond 2 profiles at Rs 6 per min and would be happy at the end of it, considering they get nothing more than basic stats and not even an image to look at. Moreover, the data on the bride that matched my requirements had nothing more than age and education coupled with an arbid high level location. The least they can do is have a voice recording of the user introducing her/himself rather than a robotic voice spewing out pre-recorded parameters. Rs 60 per hour at a cybercafe sounds like a better deal.
Considering both BharatMatrimony and Shaadi are battling it out on the traffic charts as well as on DTH, will be interesting to note if BM follows the same route.
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