Review
Chat Bazaar is primarily a dating website, with the vast majority of their members residing in the US and UK. You must be 18 or over to use the dating service. As part of their offering, Chat Bazaar offer a free chat room service to help people get to know each other – no registration required.
The Chat Bazaar Brand
Chat Bazaar is very much built for the online dating world and offers free chat as part of this match-making service. The brand has very little to say for itself in terms of site messages and ethos. The About page doesn’t contain anything at all! Generally speaking, the site and service both seem as though they are in their infancy. But with a copyright of 2007 – this suggests the brand has had over a decade to develop into something bigger than it is now.
Registration
Chat Bazaar offers a free chat room service with no registration. Just provide a nickname, your age, your gender and your country of residence. The Captcha process is a simple tick box, so no frustrating tiny hidden letters or stupid pictures of street signs!
You can create an account and a profile, but this is for the wider Chat Bazaar service that focuses on dating and finding the perfect match. You do not need this to chat – which is quite pioneering for a dating site. Most mainstream dating sites won’t allow you to message anyone until you pay for a membership!
Desktop/Mobile Capability
The Chat Bazaar mobile site is fairly easy to navigate and clearly laid out. However, the site hasn’t been properly optimised for mobile devices and you may not be able to view the whole site on your device. Make sure you click – Click here to open chatroom – which is a blue button in the middle of the page. It is important you click here, because if you click on the chat room link in the top navigation menu, the site may not work on mobile devices.
User Experience
The Chat Bazaar website is quite – well – bland really. The website is primarily white and silver, with touches of colour here and there. The chat interface gets a bit more colourful, with a sickly baby blue tone. But this doesn’t do much to improve the overall aesthetic or user experience of the site. In design terms, this is like a throwback to the 90s, but with less choice.
In terms of navigation and ease of use, the site could hardly be better, if using a desktop. Things alter slightly and become a little complicated on certain mobile devices, which is a shame as it brings our Ease of Use score down from 10 to 9. The five chat rooms are pictured above. Four are categorised by age – the other one is called I am bored.
After 10 minutes, we definitely are too, so we left.
Safety and Security
All chat rooms are intended for adults only, just like the overarching dating website itself. However, there doesn’t seem to be any parameters in place to prevent under 18s from entering the free chat room service. In terms of rules and safety guidelines, there aren’t any of those either. As with most other types of content you’d expect to see on a chat site, safety content is on Chat Bazaar either.
Customer Service
In the footer of the website you will find various links to pages of information, such as the Chat Bazaar forum. Unfortunately, the forum doesn’t exist, and you are directed to a blank page. Maybe this is a work in progress, without any indication from the site owners, who knows?
If we return to the footer, there are two more links: Help & Support and Contact Us. These both lead to the same page – which is an online contact form. You enter your name, email address, subject and message; and then wait in hope of a reply. One can only hope too! Because so far, customer service and support on this site is severely lacking.
Conclusion
When it comes to functionality, connection speed and technical performance – Chat Bazaar gets tops marks pretty much all round. Unfortunately, that’s where the top marks end for Chat Bazaar. There are very little options or supportive content, customer service is lacking and there aren’t a lot of members online at any one time. You could see this as a good thing – a tighter knit group rather than a sea of people.
However, sadly, we just found it a little bit boring. Perhaps if they jazzed the design up a little bit, this would add to the experience. But overall, everything is just a little on the bland side. It’s a 3.5 from us!
