Hanan Alnufaie
Saudi Gazette
RIYADH — The first of its kind three-day E-Commerce Exhibition in the Kingdom held under the sponsorship of Ministry of Communications and Information Technology at Four Seasons Hotel Riyadh concluded Tuesday (April 4). Its main objective was to bring together the online and the actual worlds in one place.
Saudi Gazette interviewed one organizer, a business developer of the strategic partner 9/10ths and two entrepreneurs to elaborate on this market. “One of the goals is to introduce SMEs and individuals with excellent products but they did not gain publicity yet,” one of the organizers said.
Audience and visitors communicate with the SMEs and entrepreneurs through knowing their Apps and online stores.
“We targeted everyone who is interested in E-Commerce such as owners, entrepreneurs, workers, or even the consumers to better understand this booming world,” one of the organizers said.
“We also wanted to discuss it scientifically how it evolved, the process it took and how they reached big sales,” he added
There are 1000 Apps and online stores that participated in the event. Those entrepreneurs and SMEs have expansion plans, which show the promising future of this sector in the Kingdom.
9/10ths is a program owned by Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF) which is a government entity and mandated to create more jobs in the market.
9/10ths launched “Tojjar”or ‘Traders’ which was a new service aimed to create online E-commerce platform giving opportunities for entrepreneur with passion and enthusiasm to open their online stores, expanding their customer base and increasing sales. “Tojjar” accommodates sellers from housewife’s home cooking to physical businesses to have an online presence. All it takes is to provide goods to customers, and 9/10ths will enable the stores with payment and logistic solutions,” said Eng. Muhab M. Benten, Business Development Manager at 9/10ths.
“Consumers will rate the product, pay online, and there will be a variety of logistic companies handling the pickup and delivery,” he added.
Currently social media platforms are being misused to conduct E-commerce transactions, which are not designed for, not mentioning the risks accompanied by such transactions. “One of our main objectives in ‘Tojjar’ is to increase the level of business maturity,” Muhab said.
She added “the ultimate purpose we are looking for is to create businesses that will grow to create jobs. If you today sell cheesecake from your house, tomorrow you are going to have a local staff running your business. Same goal is applied for SMEs.”
One of the speakers in the workshops said that there are expectations that E-commerce profit in the Kingdom will reach $20 billion of market size.
“With ‘Tojjar’ we are trying to bring competitiveness to the market which will have a positive impact on entrepreneurs, SMEs and their products, services based on a healthy market that will serve the consumer and build the economy,” he said.
“We also support our SMEs and entrepreneurs by providing them with valid information on marketing and branding,”he added.
Ali Alnaimy is 22-year old student and the owner of an online app ‘Pharmco’. “We thought of it since we never had someone linked between healthcare logistics and E-commerce. The main service we provide is home delivery of cosmetics, skin care products, over the counter drugs from local pharmacies. We do not export anything.”Most of the sick people are either kids or elderly. So we can ease that by the delivery of our products.”Ali said.
“We participate here to use this opportunity to gather subscriptions and conduct surveys. We have four more ideas but we will talk about them after implementation,” he added.
Ali and his two partners started from Riyadh and then they plan to expand Kingdom-wide.
“We plan to enhance efficiency of healthcare services and we will cooperate with hospitals since we are fully immersed in healthcare and E-commerce,” he said.
Noura Amane is a 21-year old who studies Respiratory Therapy and help her mother with her business. “We just opened an online store ‘Havana’ and we link it to our Instagram account. We used to use only Instagram. I believe our credibility will be enhanced since we now are well known from the MCIT,” she said.
“My mother designs Saudi traditional maxi outfits. She also goes to Korea to buy modern and chic Korean outfit. We just started three months ago. The interaction is great with people and we have regular customers,” she added. Noura believed that one of their success secrets is that when her mother travels to Korea, she brings only two pieces from every outfit design because she believes that every girl should be unique. “We all know Saudi women always like to be unique. And that helped us to have more customers,”she added.
“I feel Saudi women prefer online shopping more than shopping malls,” she noted. Noura took an online seminar on how to market own business and how to treat the customer to be more educated.
