Tony Al Saiegh believes he’s found a gap in the Middle East’s burgeoning online sales market.

While unicorns such as souq.com and noon.com focus on providing digital shopfronts for professional retailers, Al Saiegh is primarily focusing on small-scale operations from home-based artisans and individuals with his community webstore start-up Souqplace.com.

The unicorns “did a good job for us”, said Al Saiegh, Executive Director of Virtual Dusk, Souqplace.com’s Dubai-based holding company, by increasing the profile and trust in eCommerce, but he saw his venture occupying a different space.

“We’re more of a mall,” he said. “You come here, you take your space and you sell what you have. We keep communications open because we’re here to help on certain things.”

One of those areas of help is in establishing a brand identity, something Al Saiegh, with a background in marketing, communications and graphic design, feels is important

“We’ll make you a logo, a corporate identity, help you choose colours, your brand name, your social media channels also, any of that. If you have a good product, we’ll help you expose it.”

Open communications extends beyond the site. Unlike some other sites, souqplace.com encourages buyers and sellers to communicate directly with each other, allowing sellers to advertise their Facebook page and other points of direct contact.

He describes souqplace’s model as similar to the US-based Etsy, “but Etsy is extremely focused on crafts; we have part crafts and also things sold from home — it doesn’t have to be crafts.”

The website’s target seller, he says, might be someone with a part-time business selling from home in the evening. Often these people have sold their products via social media such as Instagram.

Because Souqplace.com sells the products on their behalf, the process is fully compliant with Department for Economic Development regulations, Al Saiegh said.

“It’s my duty at the end of the day to make sure the products sold meet regulations,” he said.

Over the last few months he said there had been a dramatic increase in the numbers of online payments compared to cash-on-delivery (COD) payments.

“If you don’t do cash on delivery, you’re not going to work in the GCC,” he said. “We actually charge people to do COD, and they pay the extra. Now they trust us.”

Souqplace.com started with a soft launch a year ago, and now employs 9 people in Dubai. It opened a back-end office in India in October.

Al Saiegh said the website had expanded from 2,500 listed products six months ago to 9,000 by January. Al Saiegh hopes the growth will be sufficient over the next few months to allow expansion from the UAE into the rest of the GCC, followed by the rest of the Mena region.

“Even the concept of e-commerce, we’re not going to stick with products like this. We have plans that include other selling channels and services. I’m trying to stay as much as physically possible from the traditional avenues. We have plans for physical base somewhere because we target people who are selling around, on some occasions we may bring them offline to show people their faces as well.

“We do run an eCommerce marketplace, but we’re trying to be away from the competition — which, to me, is not really competition. The concept is the same but ... they are too massive. They’re just platform marketplaces.”

 

source : gulfnews