They’ll be amongst the first to sell imported iPad 2 in the UAE. That too, at a reasonable price.
4) Which products do you intend to sell on JadoPado?
Initially it’s going to be a range of Electronics & IT. We’ll add Books and Groceries over the up coming weeks. Other than that, just about anything is possible if things go well :)
5) Considering how people in the UAE are still not so open to spending online, how do you expect to make the venture profitable? I can see people might buy electronics and book but food and supermarket stuff? Also, I’m assuming it is not feasible to send out a delivery for a 10 dirham item- so how do you plan on combating that?
On the contrary I think that people in the UAE (or Dubai – since that’s our first test market) are actually pretty open to spending online. They just don’t do it a lot of it locally. If I remember the numbers correctly Aramex’s Shop n Ship has 100K members in the region.
More recently I think the coupon sites like Gonabit, Cobone and now Groupon have actually ignited local e-commerce purchasing in small way – people are getting more comfortable with using their cards online and that’s a really good thing!
I think it’s a gamble at this point – but I strongly feel that we have a lot more traction in terms of internet and payment penetration than we did four or five years ago. Will people buy their groceries online – my question is – why shouldn’t they? If you’re priced well and offer free delivery – do you really want to spend time standing in line at a supermarket?
We’ve got a small minimum order is place – 37 AED – a little hat tip to 37 Signals and our equivalent of 10 USD to try to avoid small delivery amounts – hopefully 37 AED won’t be considered to be sizable.
Delivery will be free. I see delivery as the offset fixed cost for not paying expensive rents and prime locations, rather than being something that needs to be charged to every customer. At this time I think the only way to manage this efficiently is to do it internally rather than outsourcing it.
In a nutshell my take on it is this – If you’ve got prices that are on par with the supermarkets, free delivery and solid customer support coupled with an easy experience – It has a decent chance of working!
I remain cautious – but we really need some solid e-commerce options out here – so hopefully, here we go!
6) So when is the big day? And when can customers pick up an iPad 2 from you? Also, will you have enough stocks?
The big day may actually be this Sunday – 20th of March. We’re considering pre-announcing the exact iPad units we have available alongside pricing and do a first come first serve at 9am. The initial product range will be very limited as we work out all the various supply chain kinks.
The iPad 2 will have a fixed price and available on a first come, first serve basis. I think it may strain our servers, but that may be a good way to test them out. Prices will be determined mostly by how much it’s costed us to get them here with a pretty slim margin on top. I want to save the exact details for an upcoming blog post explaining how we did it, what it costed and so on.
At launch we should have 10 units which I know is too few. To be honest, it’s been very difficult to get a hold of them. I expect them to keep trickling in as and when we’re able to buy them out in the States and elsewhere. We may continue to do pre-announcements to let people know when we have them available again.
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