E-commerce in the MENA region is picking up, a great number of websites selling goods online have been appearing as of late but it still not hasn’t reached its maximum potential a great article as to why can be found on Wamda. Anyone that has worked on an e-commerce website in the region (or at least in the UAE) knows that accepting payments online can quickly become a major pain. I have recently worked on a Ripe and found out first hand what is like to go through all the hoops of setting up a merchant account and talking to acquiring banks.

Interestingly I couldn’t find much information online about payment gateways in the UAE or the MENA, there are two good articles on Mizalla about payment gateway alternatives and payment gateways in Lebanon, and two really informative articles written by Omar Kassim (Founder of JadoPado) one on his personal blog and the other on the JadoPado’s blog. If your planning on launching your own e-commerce website in the UAE or would just like to know more about the requirements of accepting credit cards online I would definitely read Omar’s articles including the entire comments, because he goes into great details about charges and acquiring banks in the UAE.

Or you can skip all that and just go directly with the big players such as Paypal, Alertpay, Google Checkout, 2checkout etc… But I’ll tell you the major problem with those:

• Paypal doesn’t let you withdraw your money to your local bank account in the UAE it has to be a US based account, or UAE issued credit/debit card only. You can see what Paypal offers in different countries here.
• You can’t charge users in AED only in Dollars.
• Alertpay is a good alternative and lets you withdraw your funds to your bank account in the UAE but only in Dollars, Pound or Euro. But,
• When dealing with these companies you can’t pick up the phone and complain or have an actual relation with them especially from here in the UAE. When it comes to your money you want to be sure that in case anything happens you have someone to talk to.

So I have done some research and found the following payment gateways based here in the UAE:

1. CPSP: Owned and operated by CashU (Jabbar Group), I have a personal experience with them and would recommend them because they’re PCI-DSS compliant (industry standards). They have good support staff and a long list of big clients as well as an easy to use backend system to view/export your money.
2. Innovate: I have been in touch with them and they seem to be very responsive and helpful, however I haven’t worked with them but they seem professional through all my communications with them.
3. Prosum: If you can get a hold of the sales rep your my hero, I’ve managed to get a hold of him once and never again.
4. Etisalat: They offer the service but I’m not sure I’d recommend them, I couldn’t find a contact page or a number to call, but I’d leave them as a last resort option.
5. The Socially: I found these guys online and they seem to be based in Sharjah and the UK, but after communicating with them they made it clear that they work with partners in the UAE and then they stopped responding to my emails, so I would avoid them.
6. ShopMarkaz: This is not really a payment gateway, but I came across it in my search and thought it could be helpful. Its more of a marketplace where you can setup your own shop and start selling online. I have no clue how they’ve managed to do this in the UAE and how they’ve managed to overcome the trade licensing issue required to setup a merchant account and so on.
7. UAEnet: At first I wasn’t sure if they were based in the UAE because all the prices on their website is in USD, but a quick whois search revealed that they’re based in the UAE (or at least the contact person is). But I’ve sent several contact messages through the website and haven’t received anything back.

So there you have it, if you’re serious and would like to get more information I would start by contacting the first three providers they seem to be the most professional based here in the UAE. The pricing is almost similar with all of them, because they depend mostly on risk and monthly sales volume. And just a word of advice the prices with these guys are negotiable so make sure you don’t accept the first proposal.

If you have any more information or would like to know more get in touch with us.

It appears that Flip Media, a leading digital media agency in the MENA has been acquired by Publicis Groupe. The agency setup in 2003 by Martin Diessner and Dinesh Lalvani in Dubai will be folded into Leo Burnett Wordwide but will keep its name. Both founders will act as non-executive directors and Yousef Tuqan will remain the CEO reporting to Leo Burnett’s Middle East North Africa CEO, Raja Trad.

Flip has an impressive track record and very strong name in the MENA region, this move make sense for both parties Leo Burnett will have access to great online talent and Flip Media should get more business by becoming part of a global group (as an ex-Flipper I would hope so).

It will definitely be interesting to see how things may or may not change in the future, after all they’re no longer an independent agency anymore and things can get restricted when dealing with a global agency, but we’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.

We got wind of some chatter that Joob is shutting down, the reasons are still unclear but it seems they’re financial. Joob, a company owned by the Jabbar Internet Group launched in April 2011 in the UAE and has been in Beta ever since.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Joob (which is maybe why they’re shutting down in the first place) its described on the Jabbar website as:

“Joob.com is an innovative online travel resource, available in Arabic and English. The name Joob.com comes from the Arabic word “Joob” which means to “roam” or “wander.”

By providing flight and hotel bookings at competitive rates, combined with a toll-free number linking to a call centre operating 24/7, state-of-the-art technology, and localised payment options for customers, Joob.com will redefine how leisure travel is purchased in the region.

The website offers extensive content in both Arabic and English, covering tailor-made destination information and travel products and services to help customers in the region to choose what is best for them.”

The site has officially gone into maintenance mode, we’re not sure if they’re planning on doing some changes or shutting down for good. But according to what we’ve been hearing it looks like things have gone bust for Joob. Which raises the following question what will happen to Sawty? Joob’s travel review website.

I’m just confused how a company backed by Jabbar could consider shutting down after a year of launching with no apparent marketing or advertising campaigns, was it bad planning, execution, management? Or simply a combination of all!

Whatever the reason I guess this will be a great learning experiences for Jabbar and hopefully they’ll come back with bigger and better localized products.

What are your thoughts? Let us know.

Bandoora.com is a music discovery website that aims to disrupt the current state of music in MENA region by presenting  independent and local Arab musicians. The site currently has over 250 Band/Musician covering over 32 Arab cities and providing 33 musical genre.

We had a quick chat with Abdullah Al-Khaldi the CEO and co-founder about bandoora, and he was kind enough to share with the us some information.

What is Bandoora.com?

The term “bandora” originally means Tomato in Arabic, we have it connected with music by the spelling it “BAND-oora”. Following up to the term; the website holds “Music from this neighborhood” as the main slogan to emphasis the localization of its content.

BANDoora.com is a music discovery website that aims to disrupt the current state of the Arab music by providing unique and high quality content for music lovers presented by independent and local Arab musicians across the MENA region.

How does Bandoora.com work?

Each band has their own dedicated page that includes their tracks, image, biography, social medial links, musical genre, and you may also like bands based on the musical genres.

At the moment, the only registered users that we have are bands, due to our focus on creating a community of independent bands across MENA and actually build a database of music to present it to listeners, doing this allowed us to have 100% legal content as each band and musician on bandoora.com provided us with their tracks, biography and images. The website is still under development and more features will be created in the nearest future that focus on listeners.

Where are the bands from?

Currently BANDoora.com has 250+ artists that provided 1000+ tracks covered across all MENA region such as Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, KSA, and UAE. Covering 30+ musical genres.

Are you carrying out any offline events/marketing or is it purely online?

Although our main function is online, but we also have an offline appearance, we organized our first musical event in Amman, Jordan on the 7th of Oct, where we gathered four independent bands (ElMorabba3, Gazdara, Tourabyeh, and Tareq Aljundi) with 4 musical genres (Post rock, Rap, Oriental and Funk) to present our audience with different musical experiences. And because we believe that artists are not our customers, but our partners!

We have also media sponsored several musical festivals and events such as: Jordan Festival, Albalad Festival, Music freedom day Festival, Mashrou’ Leila event, May Nasr event and many more events.

Do you have any partners?

BANDoora.com has been launched in partnership with several organizations, including Jeeran.com, Albalad Theater, and Jordan’s No 1 station for independent music Radio Albalad.

Can you give us an idea of how the site is performing?

The traffic is steadily increasing each month, as of November we were able to get 59,910 unique visitor, and on  66,000 unique visitor in December and it seems we’ll be crossing the 70,000 milestone by the end of January 2012. A main reason for this is that our partners Jeeran.com are providing us with free targeted ads spots on their portal.

What are your plans for the future?

Our future plan is to support artists financially through profit split by online music sales, and subscriptions.

A big thank you to Abdullah Al-Khald for providing the information, we wish them all the best. Do you have any comments, let us know what you think?

The latest report from effective measure displays site rankings in the GCC for December of 2011. The report states that there was a growth of 12.5% in the number of unique browsers in the following GCC countries:

1. Bahrain
2. Kuwait
3. Oman
4. Qatar
5. Saudi Arabia
6. UAE

Which sums up about a total of 46 million unique browsers in the GCC and 91 million unique browsers in the MENA region for December 2011.

Quick Overview:

1. Leading website sabq.org grew by almost 10.5% compared to November 2011, recording over 6 million unique browsers in December.
2. Arabia.msn.com grew by almost 56.6% compared to November 2011, recording over 5.7 million unique browsers in December.

List of top 100 best performing websites in GCC:

Finally, a brand that reacted well and joined the social web, a brand that has shown enormous understanding for the new rules of the web and transformed successfully: iTechia!

iTechia is tech store in Saudi Arabia, has branches across main cities, known for being the first to bring the latest tech items to the Saudi market, especially Apple products.

Itechia had a great challenge when one of the staff had asked a visiting mom and her disabled child to be careful when they are touring around the store as that might affect the “flooring”.

The mom went outrageous for such a request, however inclined and left her son outside, Bought the item perused and left. When one of the child’s relatives (his uncle) knew about the incident, who’s a well respected man who owns an internet investment company and is considered a tech thought leader in Saudi, he tweeted about the incident and mentioned that he will never visit the store again.

Thousands of followers were horrified by the accident and started retweeting, and a hashtag under #itechia was created, and the rest is history. More than a 2000 sole tweets on the subject other than the retweets of the original tweet registered on that hashtag, in a couple of days.

The issue escalated until reached influential people like the famous TV host Mona abou solaiman of “kalam nawaaem” who tweeted about it expressing her sympathy with the child. This only made more people aware of the subject, if not participating.

Welcome to the new world of Twitter.

We were eagerly watching how itechia brand would manage such online crisis. Itechia has a non-active twitter account, and an abandoned facebook page!  There were no indications that itechia brand will appear and join the conversation.

Suddenly, the well-respected man who called for the apology tweeted that itechia owner, and the chairman of the board has apologized of the incident and showed empathy for the mom & child, and that he respects itechia for such a gesture. Additionally, itechia has offered a public apology to the child in the same outlet and invited people!

As the norm from the good people in Saudi, after the apology, the same uncle started defending itechia on Twitter infront of the other tweeters who kept on blogging about it. Mentioning that the apology was accepted & is enough, and we don’t need to peruse a boycott.

Itechia twitter account came to life also, and connected with all the complaints explaining that itechia would never allow such acts and promised a solution urgently. In the same time, replied to many people who asked about the incident, responsibly, honestly and clearly.

A great gesture & prompt reaction. Well-done itechia.

This should be a heads-up for the other brands out there, who are in an online coma!

social-media power

In a country that doesn’t have consumer protection laws, Saudi’s are not complaining, they have found their way with the help of new media. We have heard many stories of violating the Saudi customer rights. Today the story involves a big name.

AL Shaya is a Giant retailer, actually the biggest in the GCC. Owning the franchise of more than 55 brands across the Middle East, this holding group is dominating a huge percentage of the Fashion market. including brands like H&M, Mothercare, Debenhams, Top Shop and many more.

Recently, AL Shaya group issued a new rule that stopped cash refunds for any purchases. Customers can only exchange their purchases. And that was applied only in Saudi Arabia; UAE & Qatar consumer right laws prevented such a greedy policy. Bearing in mind the restrictions on women in Saudi. They can’t drive; the outlets in malls don’t offer any fitting rooms, and now: No cash back! Anger spread.

Tweets started increasing, Comments on Facebook amplified, blogs intensified with posts, and BBMs fired. Normally, the end of such high connectivity resulted in a big online tribe that consists mostly of women who gathered online, united their voice under one hashtag:  #noshaya

There were more than 2600 tweets in less than a week and counting. The result:  BOYCOTT. Hundreds are calling to boycott the giant retailer.

Many women activists jumped in, one of them has launched a poll to take customers opinion, with more than 6,000 people from Saudi only condemning the new policy. And one of the activists mentioned that this poll will be sent to the mother companies of these brands! another mentioned that they can easily order online from the mother companies. Wow! Really, the online world has given people the tools to govern their issues with help of no one.

Like any other poor business who cares about money only, and nothing else (including finding better ways to communicate with his customers) AL Shaya predictably had no active online presence to answer all these concerns, mingle with these frustrated consumers, converse with them, explain to them the new “greedy” policy.

AL Shaya has an abandoned Facebook page, which didn’t escape customer’s complaints

Now, a company this huge, making such a policy without managing expectations, at least on social platforms; is doomed to fail. Communicating to people before hand, even replying to these concerns after the policy issue would have opened a channel and sucked off some anger. I promise them, no backlash would happen, only ordinary conversations.

I have seen official replies on the incident from AL Shaya spokesperson to traditional media (magazines, and a newspaper!) And not one tweet to handle the thousands of lost customers!  Are you still stuck there? Your lost audience is here, ONLINE!

The trend is catching up. And as usual, and as many big brands before him (remember Marai) lost the new online battles with customers, al Shaya will lose this one. The Saudi customer is an intelligent, connected, and well-aware of his rights, he/she doesn’t need any consumer rights agency; Social Media is offering the needed tools. Welcome to the new world, where customers own your brand. not you.

Eventually, AL Shaya group will lose & bend down to the thousand of potential lost customers, and remove the policy.

However, please don’t disturb AL Shaya brand online deep sleep.

Another failure, another brand, this time on a new level, which is good because it proves that having mere presence on social networks is not enough! It indicates again that some brands still have shallow understanding of social media.

Carrefour Saudi is known to be one of the preferred hypermarkets there, it has a good market share, enjoys a reputation for high quality & low prices. I guess this is not true anymore, at least for their vegetables section!

On the 6th of Ramadan/August, while a Saudi family was shopping from the vegetables section in Carrefour, the man found some rotten “cucumbers” packaged under Carrefour’s brand, and FLIPPED! The guy went all-over the place, complaining & shouting in a loud voice that Carrefour had taken advantage of people’s trust in quality and started showing people the package, all of that happened while another shopper had his mobile camera on documenting the whole scene, while the guy was complaining, a Carrefour’s employee came and aggressively took the package from his hand while screaming at him, then the situation went out of hands and the man lost his temper asking for the package back… and that was it.

The clip was uploaded on YouTube on September 1st; luckily, I have watched the clip the second day with only 320 views when a Saudi blogger and friend posted it on his Facebook profile. I kept an eye on the clip as I thought it was controversial, when I watched the clip again just 3 days later, it had a whopping 350,000 views! Not to mention the tweets that were generated on the subject, exceeding 200 in less than 2 days, carrying the video link.

This is not new, Saudi customers have figured a way out to complain on any bad incident such as Carrefour’s and they know how to connect with each other smoothly, Social media blessed them with massive power to express their frustration and helped them gather as one tribe and raise a united voice that may produce strong results, like what happened to the unfortunate Marai company brand.

In this case, the man got the sympathy of most people who saw the clip (although some people didn’t like his extreme anger) and they started exchanging the info on the social web. The first tweet on the subject held the video link adding the names of top bloggers in Saudi, so that they become aware of the issue, and it fired from there. The original clip reached to half a million views not to mention the tens of other clips uploaded on separate accounts with thousands of viewers, reaching in total to almost a million views in less than a week, when AL- Arabiya channel, number one news channel in Saudi, jumped in to cover the story it only made more people aware of it.

Click to enlarge

Knowing that Carrefour has good presence on social networks, and have successfully engaged people in Saudi online previously, I eagerly waited to see how such a brand would respond/handle the clip, and that’s my main point of writing this story.

To the disappointment and surprise of anyone waiting for the response, Carrefour had used a very weird strategy; Carrefour Saudi management decided that they are being attacked by a well-executed-plan to ruin their crystal-clear reputation!! Below is the “release” that was posted on their Facebook profile only:

Click to enlarge

“We would like to assure our customers that the miserable and desperate attempts from some biased people to denigrate Carrefour reputation in the last incident won’t succeed..etc” (from the press release)

Rubbish!!! How could arrogance blind some brands to apologize? Or is it simply ignorance? Whatever it was, what the above release reflects is a brand that didn’t understand what social media is all about. Additionally, the fact that they published the press release on their official Facebook page only where the accident didn’t happen, made the FANS know about it, and didn’t reach to real VIEWERS of the clip.

A simple apology from the CEO or even any executive through the same channel; in a simple video explaining the quality standards and the process they followed (or should have followed) would have been a better route to go. It will make people respect the brand more (especially Carrefour’s repetitive customers), at the same time, inviting the unsatisfied customer to show him/her the procedures taken to ensure quality, would have done wonders for the brand.  But obviously it would hurt some one’s ego instead.

The man in the clip was excessively angry I agree ( he was going nuts, but the man had his own way of expressing his anger AND no one should take advantage of that, especially the brand. When reading his interview in an online Saudi newspaper later, he said this is the second bad quality incident he faces in Carrefour, feeling he’s a regular customer, the guy got his frustration accumulated inside and then exploded).

The clip shows that the camera was on before, correct (although I believe the other shopper started his camera after the man first found the rotten product and made a fuss but was trying to look if there was more rotten cucumber packages) The clip only got circulated after a month is true (so whattt??!!! the guy didn’t have time to upload it. additionally, this only backs the idea that it wasn’t planned before, as he would have uploaded it in Ramadan where traffic on the net is at peak, not in Eid time where few are online).

All that mentioned, would still be irrelevant. The package was found in Carrefour store, packaged and branded by them and the employee came and tried to hide the package. There was a widely-circulated clip on this, hundreds of thousands saw the clip, some took it to the next level and called for a boycott, and Carrefour just failed to act properly.

And what’s more interesting is Carrefour’s claiming it’s a victim of a conspiracy from some people to ruin their reputation!!!  Someone clearly has no idea what is the new world of mouth neither it’s rules.
One part of  the press release stated: “We don’t know how this happened, we have ISO!! ” Oh big deal; I liked one of the comments on the release  “our small grocery store (dekkaneh) in the neighborhood has ISO, who cares” and this exact one was DELETED!! I wanted to take a snap shot from this exact comment to post it here, but couldn’t find it! Which only gave the subject a new dimension: Carrefour Saudi is deleting the simple comments that criticize them on their Facebook page! Just Great. So Oblivious.

It’s funny, when brands get in an online PR crisis, only then you get a feel of their understanding of social media going bad on them and the genuine feelings towards their customers.

Carrefour is a global chain, a standard international way of dealing with PR crises should be followed, and a 1 million view on such clip is a great deal! In the same time the brand is no better than other big brands CEO’s who apologized for their customers on YouTube (Dominos pizza, Toyota, KFC, American airlines and many more) on matters of quality and bad service, arrogance won’t get you anywhere with people who actually made your brand a success in the first place.

Is it that brands in the region still in a web-coma in contrary to the rest of the world? Is it that brands are “too good” to make an honest apology towards their own customers in such crises in our region? Do they have to wait for more failures examples? I’ll leave answers to you.

Anyhow, Carrefour ran away, in full speed, from the incident and I don’t know if it will succeed (if you read the comments/see the likes on the clip and on the release you will know it didn’t. not to mention the new “Carrefour boycott campaign” growing Facebook page).

Click to enlarge

Personally, i won’t trust the quality of the vegetables section there.

Most people pretend that they care about you and would help you, but they won’t even respond you when you need them; however after your death you become the dearest. This is the game people created and expect everyone plays it. If one doesn’t play this game, people would agree that the person lacks “interpersonal and intrapersonal skills”. If the person however can generate them money and word of mouth, they will surround the person, but wouldn’t necessarily care about the person. This is the worst feeling one could have, be surrounded by people, but feel lonely in heart. We need more real talks more than ever, in this day and age; let’s get real.

There are hard facts and evidence surrounded us that small talks won’t take anywhere, in fact they create more distance and barriers between people; simply because they aren’t real. We all know how to be real and why we need to be real. We sadly choose to play a game everyone else is playing; we want to be accepted as opposed to be wanted because who we are. Unfortunately the lifestyle many people around the world created for the rest of us cost the bests their lives; they choose to leave this world because they are tired of pretending.

Trey Pennington was liked by many individuals on Twitter and he was invited to various seminars and conferences to give speech, but he committed suicide on 04 September 2011 in Greenville due to depression. It is said that Trey once even updated his Facebook by saying: One of the worst things about Social Media is we can be surrounded by so many and still feel completely alone.

The last tweet Trey sent on Twitter before taking his own life was really touching and was retweeted over 100 times; maybe just to say thank you to Trey? No one could read Trey’s mind that what he was about to do, maybe because not many on Twitter knew Trey on a personal level?

A new application from Dubai is looking to give consumers a way to feel good about their purchases. The application which is developed by the Dubai based Innoventa, a leading provider of integrated solutions in management and marketing focusing mainly on the internet and mobile spaces, was recently launched and is a great and simple idea for people to shop, get rewards and help a cause.

CareZone has a neat design and is easy to use. It is basically a location-based mobile app that suggests and rewards users for checking in at specific retailers that have already partnered up with Carezone. The rewards are given as coins or “CareCoins” (which go to charity) and “MyCoins” (which you can redeem at any of the partner retailers.) Users would also be eligilble to receive more coins if they make a purchase from that retailer.

The platform uses a location-based mobile app that identifies an extensive selection of retail partners participating in CareZone. Users can see messages from brands that have made a conscious decision to be socially responsible. CareZone will also come with a social media component that allows users to share their good deeds with followers, friends and family on Facebook and Twitter, thus encouraging them to support a cause through CareZone as well.

Carezone benefits both companies and consumers while facilitating support for various charitable causes. This new mobile app aims to bridge the gap between brands and consumers in a socially responsible manner.

Which is where the beauty of CareZone lies, half of all the coins collected will be donated to a charity you support in a couple of simple taps from the app and CareZone has already teamed up with a number of leading charities, including Dubai Autism Centre, K9 Friends and the United Nations World Food Programme, among many others. Also, if any users would like to support any other charities all they have to do is contact the CareZone team and they will get in touch with that charity and add it on board.

Ritesh Tilani Innoventa CEO, explained, “Mobile search and location-based software has changed the way millions of consumers decide where they are going to eat, drink, shop and entertain themselves and their families. CareZone not only places brands top-of-mind and prominently on search results, but also gives its users a direct incentive for simply visiting an outlet. Users get further rewards and benefits for their causes if they make any purchases with a partner outlet.”

CareZone is currnetly available for the iPhone and in the UAE only, however plans to expand and move onto other mobile platforms are in the pipeline. You can download the application here.