It’s been one year now, …. Of what??
Well me researching the hyped industry of e-Commerce in UAE, I have been struggling with the market, running ads, social media, organic rankings, programmatic buying etc i.e. basically understanding the audience of UAE, and by the God’s grace I have been able to crack the code by giving my current company more than 300% growth and am very happy professionally for what I have achieved.
- Top rankings on all targeted keywords
- PLA ads with more than 3% conversion rates in Display Marketing/Google Adwords
- Facebook Ads with 2-3% direct conversion
and all this reducing the budgets up to 30% of what they were spending before me…
How to be successful in E-commerce industry in UAE – a complete list of 100+ Shopping websites in UAE
Demographical Research
Whenever one plans to launch a business in a targeted market, demographical research is a mandate i.e. population, sex ratio, age etc. As without market research viability of a business cannot be tested.
A business plan is created considering all the factors using required business tools. In this article, I won’t be commenting on the viability of E-comm but yes if you are planning to launch an E-comm venture you should be aware of total Market share and the chunk you want to grab from that.
If we believe in recent statistics by Gulf News total population in Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman were 5.2 Million in 2014 and as per Govt. of Dubai, the population of Dubai alone was 2.48 Million.
You guys can also do your research but I will stick to mine as per below:
As of 1st January 2015, the population of United Arab Emirates was estimated to be 10.1 Million people. This is an increase of 3.08 %. Cities most active online are Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah amongst other Emirates in UAE.
Approx 85% are expats and among them 69.5% are males, so now we are talking about a market dominated by multi-cultured population with males as dominating instrument of the market.
Extremely Young population 74.6% of the population lies between 20-49 Years of Age.
Things seem to be promising when it comes to online presence, Internet penetration is approx 71% from which Smartphones penetration is 63%.
So we are talking specifically about 7 million men of different cultures who are aged between 25-44 with smartphones in hand and good disposable income. How cool is that… but please don’t forget 3 million ladies out there, they are all market pullers.
So now are you ready to test the waters? Well no, first be cognizant of swimmers, Splashers and drowners, i.e. competitive analysis, which is the core part of this article which will let you know the real depth before taking a dive.
Online Shopping i.e. E-commerce Websites in UAE: The Comprehensive List.
Do you know how many E-Comm websites are serving approx 10 million people? Any Guesses??…
Ok, let me tell you…
A WHOOPING no. of 135 websites !!
It took nearly one month to research over them, It could be more but majorly all the websites are covered and if you think I missed a few, don’t kill me, just include it in comments and I will update my list.
DETAILED: ONLINE SHOPPING WEBSITES IN UAE: A COMPLETE LIST [OLD]
Research Credits: Bhoomika Agarwal (SEO & Social Media Manager)
[Blog is updated with a new list of E-Com websites in UAE/GCC – 138 websites on 11/02/2018]
[Updated List, on 02/11/2018, TOP E-com Websites in UAE/GCC]
Update on 2 Nov 2018 clearly shows you the volatile market of GCC
66 New ventures are started in 2 years and approx 70 are closed.
Above is the list of new ventures which came up between 2015- 2018
Below is the list of 75 ventures which are either redirected or closed/shut down
So we can infer that the average lifetime of an e-com venture in UAE/GCC is 2 to 3 years.
Innovate or Die
This list includes some of the lucrative metrics (data is collected via Similarweb) we have the genre of the website, total traffic, all major source channels of traffic, traffic from UAE, and major social media links to each website. This list has data as per availability.
So the list can be sorted easily to give your answers to many important questions and will make your life easier if you are new to E-comm in UAE and are looking for some authentic competitive research.
For e.g.
Top 10 websites as per total Traffic:
Top 10 Websites as per traffic in only UAE:
Top 10 websites with maximum Organic Traffic:
Top 10 websites spending the most on Display Marketing:
Top 10 websites spending most on Social Media:
Above are some examples but you can research as per your requirements, niche, competitors, and targeted audience. So a hell lot of other important questions in E-commerce industry can be answered via aggressive competitive analysis:
- How should you evaluate i.e. which channel is most profitable for you?
- How should you do your budget allocation?
- How to design a perfect digital marketing strategy to get maximum ROI?
- What should be an ideal CPA?
- How to get a good bounce rate and moreover a commendable conversion rate?
The black truth is everyone is after one macro objective and that is “Sales”. Building a rock solid brand without pulling ROI would not help your investors, so at the end of the day Sales matter and investors want to see the green metrics which are directly responsible for the ROI.
Understanding your Customer’s Product life cycle is important to answer all the questions related to Sales & ROI. E-Comm website is just another storefront to sell.
We can keep the healthy discussion on and answer these questions in the comment section, or else this article will become too long to handle, my main aim was to provide you with an authentic list of all major websites which can give you a robust idea of the industry before you punch in to invest.
So I need 2 favors from you:
- Keep me in the loop if you think I have missed any industry leader and I will plug the missing gear on to the list.
- Lets discuss the above questions in comments.
HAPPY SELLING!!!
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