HOW TO IDENTIFY GENIUNE ONLINE BUSINESSES IN NIGERIA

Nigeria has often been given negative publicity by the international community due to the activities of some of her citizens. Over the years, Nigerians have made the top list of drug traffickers, human traffickers, yahoo yahoo and other crimes. Albeit, quite a handful of Nigerians have been on their feet to put Nigeria in a positive perspective before the international community. One of such is Miss Josephine  Agwu, a cleaner at the Murtala Mohammed International  airport who returned 12 million naira that she found in the toilet. Interestingly,at the time of this event, Josephine was earning a monthly salary of 7,800.

Nigeria is a well populated country and according to the United Nations report on economic and social affairs, Nigeria has 199,959,463 citizens. Being a populated country, their is no gainsaying the fact that so many businesses are bound to exist in the country. Moreso,with the advent of internet and the social media, many online businesses has also metarmophosed. Funny enough, some of these businesses are scams and there is a dire need for internet users to beware of such businesses so that they will not be swindled of their hard earned money. 

In this write-up, we will be reviewing some of the indices that every discerning investor should consider before embarking on an online business and we will be focusing on Nigeria. 

First and foremost, every online business emanating from Nigeria should be registered with the corporate affairs commission. This is essential to ascertain the legality of the business. From the foregoing, an before embarking on an online business, there is need for due diligence to be conducted on such a business. But how can you know if a particular business is registered or not with the corporate affairs commission?  You can achieve this by conducting a public search of the business. Go to your browser and type" Public search on Corporate affairs commission ". A dialogue box will appear. You type in the name of the company, click on the captcha and identify yourself as human, not robot. If the company truly exists, the registration number of the business will pop up alongside the name of business and date of registration. 

Secondly, though a business is online, it should also have an office suite or block where people can go to for administrative purposes. If you are just investing in a business that does not have a physical presence and their website is suddenly "not found" on the internet, to whom will you cry to? 

Thirdly, a genuine online businesses must have something they are investigating or trading on. It could be,real estate, gold, jewelry, crypto-currency, recharge cards, computers,  name it. The bottom line is that their should be some form of trading involved. If their is no trade involved, I  can authoritatively tell you that it is a scam. Fancy someone telling you to donate money to a particular person and get back double of the amount in the next six hours! You should ask yourself a question, " what kind if investment will they be doing with my money to generate double of my capital in the next six hours? If there is no investment in view, my dear run for your hard earned money!  Again, they will come to you with stories that someone has been paid double,  don't fall for it. What if the person that has been paid is one of their cronies?  How will you know? They may even pay you initially but believe you me, in the long run, you will loose your hard earned money.

Fourthly,every genuine business be it online or not should have a company logo. The logo kind of brands the company. The company logo is always displayed on their business cards and their letter headed papers. 

Folks, these are some of the ways of Identifying genuine online businesses in Nigeria. If you know of other ways of identifying genuine online businesses in Nigeria that I have not added to this write-up,  you can add yours in the comment se