Reviews Goomena Review

Last updated on December 15, 2015 | by Aet Suvari

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Goomena Review

Goomena Review Aet Suvari

Goomena Review Ratings

Popularity
Trustability
Easy to use
Profiles
Search
Price and Value

Summary: Free for girls, this site would mainly work for you if you don’t mind “bidding” for your date and live in London.

2.6


Goomena.com advertises itself as a ‘revolutionary dating site’ offering ‘delicious dates’ for ‘hot girls’ and ‘successful men’.

But aren’t these two groups of people who don’t normally have any problem finding partners? Our Goomena review uncovers the user experience behind the marketing promise…

Goomena says on their homepage, they ‘guarantee the results’ so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and see what they offer.

Now, before you sign up, you can take a look around, just to see what exactly Goomena promises to deliver and how they go about their business. This might come as a bit of a shock to you (it was to us!), but in Goomena female members are paid to go on dates – and accordingly, male members pay.

As to why exactly they’ve chosen this approach, there’s a long and detailed explanation on their homepage, but in a nutshell, it’s because ‘a date costs money and time’ for the ladies who ‘take trips to the hairdresser, buy shoes and dresses and take cabtrips’. At the same time, men naturally will want to ‘impress the ladies’ by ‘reimbursing what they have spent to let them know they are gentlemen who have class’.

Yes, they really do say that.

Signing up

There are different ways to sign up and become a member. You can just register on the site or get connected with Facebook and/or Google Plus. If you sign up through Goomena, you’ll start with marking your main characteristics – age, sex, location as well as height, body type, hair and eye colour. You can upload photos both for your public as well as your private profile – the latter meaning that you get to decide who sees your personal pictures. At least one photo is required on the site, so you can’t just leave that blank.

Bear in mind that other than letting you upload your photos, Goomena doesn’t really walk you through the profile-creating process. It creates a sort of profile for you and adds your characteristics by default, which only makes me think that members here don’t pay too much attention to the profiles in the first place if your photos look great. Still, it’s hardly a surprise, as after all, this is how the site markets itself in the first place. By the way, it’s one of the very few dating sites where I’ve seen ‘Breast size’ category in the ‘Personal Info’ menu.

Members can also indicate on the site what kind of relationship they’re looking for – ranging from ‘Friendship/Activity Partner’ to ‘Long Term Relationship/Marriage’ and ‘Mutually Beneficial Arrangements (Sugar Daddy/Sugar Baby)’ to ‘Married Dating/Discreet Affair’. Oh, ladies can also mark if they’re willing to travel with the guys, which we can sort of understand… however, we can’t say the same about the very dubious-sounding question whether they’re willing to ‘work for you’ if you have a ‘job opening’ for her. Still, I’d strongly recommend young ladies to hold their horses before they start treating this site as a potential jobseeker’s goldmine.

Offers and bids

So how does the whole thing work? Basically, if you’re a woman, you will upload your photos and start waiting for “likes”. These are basically just to “spark” the interest and both men and women can send them to each other.

The next step is ‘bidding’. Basically, guys who like you can start making ‘offers’, which female members can then either accept or reject – and there’s also something called counter-offering, which basically involves bargaining over how much a guy should pay to go out with a girl. Ladies can also just name their bids for the first date. No money is paid before the date, the whole – potentially extremely awkward – paying process takes place when the date has happened and as the site advises, ladies should expect and gentlemen should pay ‘50 per cent at the start and 50 per cent at the end of the date’. How on earth is this supposed to make ANYONE involved in this matter feel dignified and comfortable is beyond me.

Is it for real?

Of course, anyone can search members and send out likes but in order to send messages men have to be paying members – it’s all free for the ladies. The system will choose their own matches for you and you can also check out everybody who has viewed you or favourited you. And of course, there’s the search as well. You can’t search by postcode but you can search for members near you. We’re based in Edinburgh – and the search came back with just one match and other four from the whole of Scotland. That’s it. Granted, London has a lot more matches.

Are the male members affluent and female members beautiful? Well, we surely aren’t going to give out marks to the ladies – beauty being in the eye of a beholder and all that… although we can say that it’s hard to believe the slogan ‘Models, students, actresses, personal trainers: they are all here!’ is the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

When it comes to guys, it’s pretty hard to assess someone’s affluence by their profile pic but selfies or mirror photos of someone in their boxer shorts is a kind of a no-no on any dating site. Many guys on the site are also very young so their affluence is questionable at best. In any case, they’re definitely not Sugar Daddy material.

Guys’ profiles seem to be genuine enough, can’t be as sure about the ladies. After signing up as a male user and not even yet putting up a profile pic, we already received a message from someone, which is never a good sign. Guys have to pay for reading the messages as well as sending, so this could be a ploy how to get you interested in purchasing some credits for reading the message.

Yes, there is no fixed monthly/yearly membership price. To be able to use all the services on the site, men have to purchase credits. £10 gets you 1000 credits, £25 is good for purchasing 3000 credits and £70 gives you 10 000 credits. However, bear in mind that you can’t pay for a successful bid with the credits – you can only start communication with them. A single message costs 50 credits – both to send AND to read, so you can do the math.

Conclusion

So what’s the conclusion – is it a site worth your while if you’re interested in that type of dating? It certainly seems genuine enough and is not badly designed either. It’s easy to use, free for girls and affordable enough for the guys (not that it should even matter to them, seeing that they’re all supposed to be ‘affluent’ here). Will it actually work this way? To be honest, I doubt it has many success stories. Most dating sites will get you a date without you having to pay to the girl to go out with you, so I don’t actually see the point behind it. But if that type of thing turns you on – and hey, we’re not judging! – then I suppose it fulfils its purpose.

Goomena Review - GoodPros: Easy to use, clear and well designed.
Goomena Review - BadCons: Dubious philosophy, doesn’t seem to be very successful and/or popular.

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Finito – our Goomena review stops here, congrats for surviving to the end!


About the Author

has been reviewing and writing about the world of online dating since 2008 and the launch of Online Dating Help. A stickler for promoting ethical practices within the UK dating industry she champions the sites that get it right while highlighting those holding it back. You can follow her on Google+



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