More Please: A Welcome Wave of e-commerce in the UAE

It has been obvious for some time now that e-commerce is the next great land-grab opportunity on the Arab web. After cashing out of

, it's

. My bet is that he'll make more money from that than he did from Maktoob.

There are plenty of issues with building regional e-commerce sites, especially when dealing with the notoriously complex customs regimes of big markets like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Even within the GCC, shipping can be incredibly difficult - I have head from logistics industry people that it it is quicker and easier to get something from Shanghai to Dubai than from Dubai to Riyadh.

For the time being, it seems most likely that e-commerce sites will be country-specific affairs, given the amount of local knowledge and ground game it takes to do well in somewhere like Egypt or Syria. And here in the UAE, it is cool to see that activity in the space is starting to heat up, especially over the last couple of months.

GoNabit, launched by the former bayt.com entrepreneur-in-residence Dan Stuart, is looking like a pretty well executed local version of the big American and European group shopping sites like

and

. Groupon went into a new round of investment this month

, while the French site, Vente Privee,

this year.

Today, a me-too version of GoNabit started getting promoted:

seems to be a fairly similar idea, based on the "sign up and get a different deal every day" proposition that has been done extremely well in the US by sites like

.

And

, which will let UAE residents order online from hundreds of different local restaurants. Anyone who has lived in Egypt and experienced the wonderful, wonderful

(bought out by Linkdotnet) will know that this kind of service can be extremely useful, especially for the daily office lunch order.

According to Nevzat Aydin, Foodonclick's founder it plans to spend US$1 million just on advertising the site in the UAE this year. That is a huge budget for a website, and shows that these guys are going for the real mass market, rather than the typical dotcom strategy of starting small among the nerds and early adopters and spreading via word of mouth. Pity about the awful brand name.

Also growing in the UAE are more traditional online shopping sites like

,

and the old standards like

and

.

It seems pretty clear that the UAE and Gulf in general is fertile ground for this stuff. Consumerism is a national sport, everybody has web access and credit cards, and the countries are small enough that delivery should be pretty nifty (and working-class wages are low enough that delivery should be cheap, or free.) If Amazon can rock same day delivery in a country the size of the US, there's no excuse for not being able to manage it in the UAE, let alone Qatar or Kuwait.

My call: someone needs to do a version of Netflix. During the hot summer months, a weekend spent watching an entire season of Mad Men is a weekend well spent. An horde of mainly Chinese women walk door-to-door selling knock-off DVDs - so why not put these pirates out of business by offering the real deal: weekend rentals (preferably by the season), ordered online and sitting at your doorstep when you get home from work. Entrepreneurs, get to it.