Ordable: An Innovative Online Platform Providing Businesses With Their Independent Web Shop

Salem Marafi, Co-Founder and General Manager at Ordable, an innovative ecommerce solution for businesses in Kuwait and the GCC, gives an overview of the online platform.

“Kuwait has an entrepreneurial culture in general. As the younger generation grows up, the way they are doing business is fundamentally different. Whereas, traditionally, we thought of online business as a web shop, today, it is really taking place on social platforms, such as Instagram or Facebook. Projections for this market have also changed. In 2017, I commissioned a study that projected the ecommerce market to be valued at about 20 billion. Today, it has been revised up to 28 billion, which really represents what is happening in this market. The government is also trying to deal with macroeconomic factors, such as COVID, and really trying to strike a balance between allowing people to do business and allowing the economy to grow, but also keeping their people safe. They have been doing a really good job with that, except that businesses have found themselves trying to be more flexible, where it is not really built into their businesses. Kuwait has a peculiar market. 80% of it is made up of food and beverage, while 20% is made up of other sectors, and that does not even begin to account for the home businesses that are selling on Instagram or on Facebook. So, that really created an opportunity where the government was being forced to create new legislation because of macroeconomic forces, businesses being forced to comply with these new rules and regulations, without a real solution in the market to go to. That is where Ordable came in. We built that solution for them. Businesses on Ordable have three major benefits. The first is that they are in control of their costs. The next best alternative to selling online can cost 20% and up to 30% of their margin. With Ordable, they are saving up to 30% of their margin by selling through an independent platform or their web shop. The second benefit that businesses on Ordable get is independence. Previously, businesses had to go and send an email or make a request to another business to get something changed online. On aggregators, they would be listed side by side with their competitors and bigger businesses on aggregators get more attention. With Ordable, our businesses can just log into their dashboards and make the changes that they want. Control is the third benefit that businesses have. That really pertains to the breadth of features that they get on Ordable’s dashboard. Whether that is controlling your working hours, the number of days that a bakery needs to get an order, or the number of employees that can have different access levels, they have complete control of their business online. When my co-founder and I started this business, we came from really big blue-chip companies where we had insights at our fingertips. Smaller businesses, and in fact, even some of the larger businesses we served did not have that level of insight to their online business. And so, whereas we were used to looking at reports from companies, the likes of Agility, Facebook, and Amazon, we found that businesses, whether large or small, did not have this level of information. So, we put together reports based on the data that was flowing into their web shops that allowed them to see their business in a completely new light. Whether that was automatically segmenting their customers so that we can do better marketing, or reporting on stock level information so that they can do better inventory management, or even if we are just looking at their top sellers, that information just flows into the dashboard in an easy and consumable way so businesses do not really have to do the heavy lifting. Now, they just take action. With Ordable, we offer cost savings, independence, control, and the deepest level of insights that this market has seen”, says Salem Marafi.

ABOUT ORDABLE: Ordable is a single platform with powerful features. Stemming from a local home business that scaled 20 times in 1 year, Ordable has built a solution that works understanding the needs of small and medium businesses. The online platform is integrated with delivery providers, payment providers and inventory management systems, that cater to local business needs. Start your own online store today!

For more information, please visit: www.itsordable.com.

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