Come February 28, 2015, Google will shut down Woza, its free website tool designed to give start-ups and small businesses, “The opportunity to create their own websites… and develop an online presence — for free, and in under an hour.”
Though Google is not citing specific reasons for the shut-down, Fin24 reports that complaints of fraudsters using Woza to perpetuate bad business practices have dragged down the Google service. The service which launched in 2012 in South Africa, after similar services were launched in Kenya and Nigeria a year earlier, will, according to a statement released to memeburn.com, be replaced by “Google My Business”.
“Closing offerings always involve tough choices,” Google says, “but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users, and we want to ensure that businesses in South Africa get the best of the web, which is why we’re introducing new options.”
In Nigeria and Kenya, Google also shut down similar services at the end of 2014, but Google is saying that users can transfer their sites, by purchasing a domain from Vodacom, or use the search company’s ‘My Business’ offering, which helps customers find businesses via searches and illustrates where the businesses are located.
Already, new subscribers on the service websites in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria are redirected to the landing page on Google “My Business” for listing and cataloguing.
