Internet Babel

What’s Pingo?

Pingo is a service of iBasis, one of the world’s leading international long-distance carriers. The iBasis network is your assurance of superior quality and reliability—in addition to the most competitive rates out there.

Personally, I’ve never used calling cards, have no real familiarity with them or the core need for them. Other than to save a few pennies… meh, call charges aren’t something on my super high priority list. But passing that, let’s take a look at Pingo.com as a service, site and online based business as apposed to something I wouldn’t use.

Design and Feel

Pingo.com has an exceedingly fresh and simplistic stylistic feel to it. Much like Google or any big players online when you think about it. White background, well designed logo, standard links, a bit of graphic touch-up and a slogan. Gets pretty much top marks for me in terms of structure, design and feel. Captures that new-age, web 2.0 feel nicely, as well as looking and feeling up to date.

Ease of Sign up

No messing about here. In terms of sign up, Pingo has done well to keep it short and concise by getting your main info at the start. Gaining you as a user, then explaining the bulk when your inside.

I think this is just how you should have people sign up with a service site. You don’t want big paragraphs and tons of mandatory fields on a sign up page. Just enough to get by.

After you fill out the sign up form, you’ll get an email explaining how to login and use your account. Then, you can go login and start saving on calls. You also get a free $5 of call credit when you sign up. Incase you hadn’t noticed on the above picture

Ease of Use

You can get all Pingo’d up in a mere 4 steps. They’re as follows…

Key Points

• You can pre-program your phone so that there is no PIN codes
• You can speed dial up to 25 people internationally
• It cost you nothing to sign up!
• You get a free $5 credit

There are some nice little handy benefits you get from this service. But not too many.

Affiliate Program

Every Internet marketer loves a good affiliate program. Well, lets not be generic and use cliche phrases. But we can say, with assumed confidence that; a large amount of GOOD Internet marketers certainly love a good affiliate program. So, is there a super-affiliates dream built into Pingo? To be honest, I’ve never really been much of an affiliate marketer. But I have used a few.

Pingo say they’ll pay you up to $15 when you send them a customer. Now as far as I can see, there’s no minimum payment here. So theoretically up to $15 sounds good because you see $15. But will it usually be $15? Who knows. I don’t because I haven’t used the program yet! I had to bang this stomping review out for the guys over at Pingo though as I really was taking way too long, due to other stuff… you know. So I haven’t had a chance to properly use the program yet.

On the outset it all seems nice but the affiliate program is through LinkShare. Not saying there’s anything particularly wrong with that but I much prefer, if I’m going to use an in-site affiliate program at all. For the affiliate program to be… in-site, as apposed to external. It’s nice and convenient to have the program built in, all compact within the site’s well structured design and I think it’s a bit of a shame Pingo haven’t done it.

I think a lot of companies tend to go with the option of separating their affiliate program a little bit and send their affiliates off to new window land to explore the depths of a site which looks nothing like theirs, maybe just to take the load of their server in terms of displaying, potentially shed loads of stats a day. Maybe so they can save on costs and focus on the actual driving force of the company. Which is understandable.

All I know is, I won’t be using this affiliate program. Not just because it’s external but also because I don’t believe the service is appealing enough to draw tons of customers via an affiliate link.

Overview

Looking at the site. The company. The service and the product as a whole. I can’t really fault Pingo – they do a top job and seem to genuinely enjoy their service as much as their many customers do.

But it’s definitely not for me. On the business side of things, these guys are pros and they know how to present in a manor that draws customers. But in all honesty their service just does nothing for me. It’s one of those products that makes me think… ”I wouldn’t mind having that” but then again I don’t particular want it either.

Now with the use of the affiliate program, I think there’s quite a limited market for this product in the realm of social online marketing. On a mass scale of course the market for these guys is incredible and it’s a very social friendly product. But online, I would follow the intuitive gut feeling that this type of product/service makes most people subconsciously turn a blind eye because it just doesn’t offer that much.

It’s not that it’s bad or that the site is bad, it’s just that… the benefits of this service don’t seem great enough to want to make most lazy web users click on the advertisements.

Anyway, as I’ve clearly made clear as a clear crystal ball on crystal ball celeberation day, this service isn’t for me. The business and site aspects of Pingo are spot on though, so if you fancy giving their service a go – Click this link!