Where the US shops, others go

UAE retailers have embraced White Friday. That’s particularly good for online shopping

Retail stores display "Black Friday" advertisements and banners on Oxford Street in central London (AFP PHOTO / OLI SCARFF)

Where US retailers go, the rest of the world usually follows. This is hardly surprising, because once a concept has been proven to generate sales and revenue in the United States – a mature market of hundreds of millions of consumers – there’s a good chance it will work elsewhere.

So it has proved with Black Friday and the days leading up to it, which mark the start of the Christmas sale season. This relatively recent trend of offering huge discounts for a few days only has reached the UAE, where it is known as White Friday.

From one perspective, the appearance of this shopping bonanza in the region is puzzling. The UAE is hardly ill-served for shopping fiestas. In addition to regular events like Dubai Shopping Festival, there are also at least three religious holidays that prompt special shopping experiences: Eid Al Fitr, Diwali and Christmas.

But from the perspective of retailers, it is vital to bring White Friday here, because retailers here are competing not merely with other stores in the country, but with stores around the world.

The emergence of reliable delivery companies like Aramex has made the process of purchasing products abroad extremely easy. Many UAE residents will have taken advantage of Black Friday in the US to purchase products that are either unavailable here or significantly cheaper overseas, even with the cost of delivery. UAE retailers, then, have to compete.

That’s not a bad thing by any means, and it is particularly promising that online retailers have done well out of the sales push last week. Online shopping is a huge growth market here – which is another way of saying that it is still at a very early stage compared to online shopping elsewhere.

Customers generally have not embraced online shopping here, partly because of a degree of remaining logistical constraints and a reluctance to share credit card details online.

But retailers have also not focused on the service. Last week, with White Friday, some did, offering online-only deals. That’s a good start. Online shopping is good for both companies and customers. It’s embrace by UAE retailers would be an American import worth copying.