E-commerce and social media are comfortable companions, and the innovative Emirati siblings behind Yebab have drawn on their experience in both fields to launch a “social shopping” app.
Having created a wedding directory in 2008 and then pivoting to create the social photo-sharing app in 2014, Murshed and Mareyah Mohammad Ahmad, recognised in 2015 by The National’s readers as top #UAEinnovators in business, have now come up with iwant.
Playing on the craze for celebrity and blogger looks on Instagram and Snapchat, users can snap or screenshot a product or picture they like and send it via the iwant app to local department stores and shops in the UAE.
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The system uses image recognition software to pick out a brand name from the image and only sends the request to stores stocking the brand.
The user can then chat to retail staff in real time using the app – available for iPhone now and Android in the next couple of months – and, if available, purchase it for delivery within two hours of purchase.
“This is a new way of socialising commerce and connects retailers with people in a new way,” said Murshed. “Sometimes something is out of stock across the UAE; this saves you going from store to store for the same answer. It saves a lot of hassle.
“Iwant allows for impulse buying,” he adds. “Everyone is influenced by celebrities, friends, family, whoever they follow, and they want to know the price and availability of things they see. If they need to go to the mall at the weekend, they will forget it; this is an immediate way of connecting and making purchases happen.”
With a pilot phase ongoing and four partnerships with major retailers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, iwant gives users access to 750 brands and 260,000 items on these shops’ shelves.
The Mohammads do not want to share actual sales figures but say that “a few hundred” customers are involved in iwant’s pilot, and return to order five to six times a month. The most popular items are skincare and make-up, then shoes and handbags.
E-commerce in the UAE is catching up to worldwide popularity, hitting US$783 million in 2015 and set to reach $1.6 billion by 2020, according to Euromonitor. Google Mena estimates that only one per cent of retail revenues in the country come from online, compared to 10 per cent in more advanced markets.
“Clearly people are buying everything online,” said Murshed. “The real value of iwant is that the customer has someone to talk to, not a list of items or a database. They ask a question and the retailer does the job of finding it in their current inventory.”
But as the premise of iwant relies on sales staff picking up the request on the app in-store, how will it work on a busy weekend evening at the mall?
“We say to retailers to treat the customer as if they were entering the store,” said Mareyah. “We cannot have them left [waiting] 10 minutes without being served. Usually they have a benchmark of three minutes to serve and that is what we are also trying to achieve through iwant.”
Meanwhile the Yebab wedding business now acts as a directory of services rather than of stores, as “stores now have profiles in every social network”, saidMurshed, and the Yebab chat app continues – although plans for an Android version have stalled. The reason they are building Android for iwant is mostly because retail staff have Android phones, said Murshed.
The siblings are not looking for investment at present; they say revenues are “sustainable”, although their previous investment from N2V in 2010 helped them expand and hire new resources, and they have doubled their Jordan-based development team in the past year.
They plan to train their existing UAE sales team to take over iwant business development: currently the Mohammads are doing this themselves.
“We always keep an eye on how behaviour and the market change, and we change with that. You cannot stay the same,” said Mareyah.
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