According to the report of National Cartographic Center of Iran, after not in-person sales of this organization's products in special circumstances due to the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the country, a total of 3864 requests were registered in eshop.ncc.org.ir, of which 1360 were finalized, 1561 are waiting for payment and 848 were rejected for various reasons.

Engineer Ali Safaei, Manager of Technical Services Department of National Cartographic Center of Iran, announced a 27% increase in the number of map orders of NCC by pointing out that the total number of registered orders was 3050 requests for the same period last year.

In response to a question about the change in the process of registering map orders from face-to-face to non-face-to-face, he added: "the easiest option for the colleagues was to continue the previous procedure; but NCC tried to overcome the difficulties and challenges of changing a routine of many years with the goal of facilitating the procedure for the public. It is clear that replacing a new routine with the one which everyone is accustomed to, will face challenges that resolving them requires the support of the dear public and clients."

Referring to the specialized nature of NCC products, Safaei continued: "Customers need to be fully familiar with these products so that they can easily register an order online. Unfortunately, in previous years, most of the customers who came to NCC were not familiar with technical specifications which were needed to receive specialized data, and in most cases, due to their unfamiliarity with the requested data, they suffered a lot and also NCC experts bothered even more, because they had to explain the technical details to the clients for registering the orders much more than those descriptions of organizational tasks."

The Manager of Technical Services Department of NCC, by emphasizing that the slightest change in the type, year or scale of the recorded data could have a significant impact on the future decision-makings, pointed out: "it is necessary for the esteemed customers to receive the necessary technical advice from the competent authorities before referring to the system, and register their orders after being fully justified with the specifications of the requested data."

 It is worth mentioning that the guidelines for the use of Rasa system (index of NCC products) and eshop sales system (here) have also been compiled and published which are constantly being improved and updated.

Safaei concluded at the end: "On the whole, since the launch of non-face-to-face sales system, NCC staff have tried their best to improve the quality of services, despite the limitations of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in the country."