Saif Qazi, Co-founder and Managing Director at Urban Point and Omar Ashour (R), Co-founder and CEO of EButler.
Aggregator companies are thriving in Qatar’s growing mobile commerce (m-commerce) industry. M-commerce, which is the buying and selling of goods and services through smartphones and tablets, is a form of e-commerce.
And while some food aggregators such as Talabat and Zomato are already making strides not just in Qatar but regionally and internationally, several Doha-based product and service aggregators are also quickly catching on to gain their market share.
“People want service aggregators. It’s basically the change of behavior. People are using apps more, and that’s why everything is going to be booked that way. But in reality nobody wants to download 30 different apps for 30 different services. I had that frustration, I didn’t want to cluster my phone. That whole process is a lot of hassle and time consuming,” said Omar Ashour, Co-founder and CEO of EButler, in an interview with The Peninsula recently.
Dubbed as Qatar’s first one-stop app for any service needed; from home services like cleaning and maintenance, to car services including having your car taken to Fahes for registration renewal, as well as personal services like fitness training, legal services and even personal shopping. This m-commerce startup which was launched in January, promises to connect users with vetted and quality local service providers ‘with the tap of a button’.
Currently, EButler has already had about 10,000 downloads, and 70 percent of this are registered users. Ashour added: “We’ve been growing about 65 percent average month-on-month growth. Our target market started with expatriates, but it quickly turned into Qataris as well and people from all over the world. We’re a local startup with global goals. We want to represent Qatar on the global stage as one of the success stories of startups. And we’re aiming to grow in other countries as soon as next year. We’re looking at expanding to Kuwait, Turkey, and Oman”.
The EButler app can be downloaded for free and users pay for the services without extra fees or markup, said Ashour. He added that the startup company has over 100 local service providers from various industries enrolled in its platform and is adding more every week.
Urban Point, which provides mobile-based incentives for lifestyle experiences in Qatar, is another m-commerce startup that is proving to be a hit among the residents. This lifestyle savings app was awarded Mobile App of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine, and has been selected by the World Economic Forum as a top Mena startup.
To date, the company has over 100,000 members. It also has over 300 partners from various industries such as food & drink, beauty & health, fun & leisure, and retail & services. And its partners have so far made over QR12m through the various marketing strategies implemented under the digital platform.
Saif Qazi, Managing Director at Urban Point, said that the company’s partnership with Ooredoo was a key factor to its growth, in addition to providing users with unique benefits and strategy. He added: “Qatar is a great market for m-commerce startups to quickly test, pivot and scale. It has one of the highest telco and internet penetrations in the world and excellent government support programs for tech startups. There are a number of successful m-commerce applications that are heavily used by the mass population in Qatar. The market appetite for mobile products already exists in Qatar and startups just need to make sure that they provide a quality product that fulfils a need”.
Urban Point has already expanded to Kuwait and will soon be launching in a few other countries. “We focus on developing long term relationships and provide continuous and unique value to our partners, and this has helped us not only sustain our growth but also to use that growth and success as a validation to form partnerships in new markets. We envision Urban Point to be the starting point of local commerce in every country in which we operate,” Qazi added.
Similarly, Getit Group, a 100 percent Qatari multivendor online market platform which is referred to as the best online shopping portal in the country, has also recently launched its mobile app. The company’s web store offers every type of groceries, foodstuffs, mobile and electronic goods, fashion apparels, home appliances, industrial products and services and more.
As part of its long-term plans, the company is targeting to reach 40 percent of the market share in Qatar’s e-commerce industry which is estimated at over QR2bn. Globally, mobile commerce sales is predicted to make up for 53.9 percent of all e-commerce sales by 2021, according to market estimates. Smartphones are expected to be the main contributor to overall m-commerce growth.
A PwC study on 2019 Consumer Insights in Middle East also stated that the biggest growth in mobile payment was experienced in the Middle East, with a 45 percent increase in mobile payment usage over the period of one year. That is almost double the rate of Western markets.
For the first time in the 10 years that PwC has conducted the survey, consumers surveyed are using smartphones over other mobile devices to shop online, with smartphone growth estimated at a 54 percent CAGR from 2016 to 2019 in the Middle East. About 24 percent of the consumers surveyed are also using a smartphone to shop online weekly.
