Smartphones drive online shopping
RETAIL SALES EXCEED EXPECTATIONS DUE TO SEASONAL OFFERS
Legions of shoppers opened their wallets in preparation for the start of the holiday shopping season across the globe. In the UAE, the holiday shopping season started early [last Wednesday], but in the US, it started from Thursday instead of Friday.
Shoppers have seen promotions and discounts roll out for the past week and some online retailers are still offering discounts in the UAE.
According to the National Retail Federation’s Thanksgiving Weekend Survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, more than 151 million people have shopped either in stores and/or online over the weekend in the US.
Souq.com, the largest online retailer in the Middle East, said that sales have soared tenfold over average daily sales on the first day [Wednesday], with 40 per cent of the sales coming from the mobile app.
This reinstates the growing m-commerce trend in the region, said Ronaldo Mouchawar, CEO and co-Founder of Souq. com.
“We have more than doubled our last year’s sales record with over 13 million visitors during the sales period [November 2528]. We sold close to 600,000 items, which is 2.5 times more than last year’s sales. Over 40,000 different products were sold, with the top selling items were perfumes, followed by mobiles, watches, make up and handbags,” he said.
Younger population
With more people shopping online, e-commerce sales are poised to hit record numbers in 2015, growing 11 per cent over last year to reach $83 billion (Dh304.6 billion) globally.
Mouchawar said that high GDP per capita, robust mobile penetration rates, younger population and ease of buying are some of the key factors fuelling a boom in online sales in the Middle East.
According to Adobe’s 2015 online holiday sales forecast, Black Friday is predicted to see $2.7 billion in sales after Cyber Monday’s $3 billion. Mobile drives majority of online shopping visits (51 per cent).
Parag Mehta, head of operations at LetsTango.com, said that sales were phenomenal throughout the entire weekend.
“Our sales mostly were for bundle deals and accessories like mobile phone cases and speakers. ,” he said.
LetsTango is participating in the National Day offers from December 1-5, with new exclusive offers for gaming laptops from Alienware and Asus.
The best-selling products were MacBook, iPhone 6S, Ray-Ban, Xbox, and electric scooters.
Majority of the retailers saw brisk business for smartphones, especially for iPhone 6S. “We have already crossed our 50 per cent year-on-year growth. We were getting our share despite heavy competition from other online retailers,” he said.
There is a lot of momentum among the buyers as people have “disposable incomes” because it is the beginning of the month and consumer confidence is “improving” coming into the holiday season.
Nikola Koustic, retail analyst at Euromonitor, said that the “Black Friday” concept is gaining traction in the region. JadoPado said that sales were in line with their expectations, without giving any figures.
“Saturday was the best day for us as most people take Friday as the rest day in the UAE,” Omar Kassim, CEO of JadoPado.com.
Sherif Rizwan, chief executive of AlShop.com, said that last Friday was an “unbeatable Friday”. The sales were better than last year.