Category: e-commerce

Talabia, Free Online Food Home Delivery Service

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TalabiaTalabia is a new home delivery company that was launched in Kuwait in December 2007, initially using offline call center services, with the objective of providing a free home delivery service for the leading food products in Kuwait, making it more convenient for consumers to order fresh and frozen food products from the comfort of their own homes and have them delivered to their doorstep.

In April 2008, they took their service online, through a site available in both Arabic and English, bringing their home shopping experience to all connected households in Kuwait.

The site is very well designed, simple and easy to use; it incorporates a well organized and categorized product catalog, making it straightforward to find the products you’re looking for, add them to your shopping cart and place your order; also giving you the possibility to specify your preferred delivery time.

Talabia screenshot

Talabia currently delivers products from leading food brands including Sadia, Hilal, Lamb Weston, Gulfa, Hana and Hayat; and they plan to continue adding more quality brands and products to cover more of the consumers’ needs.

The Talabia website was developed by Olive Interactive.

# Talabia

SouqElArab, Online Social Shopping Portal

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SouqElArab

SouqElArab is a growing Arab online social marketplace; It offers its visitors a social shopping experience whereby they can network with like minded people and do some shopping at the same time.

Their shopping experience is based on users’ recommendations and feedback; Visitors can rate and review products and come together to form a community based on their hobbies and interests.

SouqElArab provides a platform for vendors to bring their product catalogs online and easily start selling their products without the fuss of having to create their own web presences. Suppliers from over 15 countries are currently working with SouqElArab.

Through these different suppliers, SouqElArab offers a large variety of products from Books, Magazines, Music, Movies, e-Downloads and Software, to Food and delicacies, Health Care and Beauty products, Kids’ Toys and Electronics, to Hookahs, Shisha, Clothing, Antiquities, Art, and other Middle Eastern cultural products.

SouqElArab screenshot

The website is available in both English and Arabic; with French, Persian and Afrikaans coming soon, aiming to expand both the user and supplier base.

SouqElArab Inc., founded by Fadi F. Dababneh, is the company that runs the website; with offices in USA, Jordan and Lebanon.

# SouqElArab

CarDaleel, Online Arab Auto Trading Service

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CarDaleelCarDaleel, is a newly launched service based in Jordan, that aims to be an online auto trading hub for people all around the Arab world.

Users can list their cars for sale, including all necessary technical details about them, as well as their state and age, to make them easier to search for and find; photos of the cars can also be included.
On the other hand, users looking to buy a car can go through the cars listed on the website, by country, by make and model, or use the advanced search to find cars based on different criteria of their choice; once they find a car they’re interested in, they can directly contact the seller through the site.

Auto-dealers can also use the service to list their available cars for sale directly on the site, therefore adding a new sales channel to their business.

The interface is in Arabic only for the time being, but an English version is planned soon. The service is completely free for all users, both individuals and auto-dealers.

CarDaleel screenshot

CarDaleel was founded and launched in Jordan by Khaled Salah, Khamis Siksek and Hamzeh Abu Zakham.

# CarDaleel

Otlob, Free Online Food Ordering Service

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Otlob is a free online food ordering service that was first launched in Egypt back in 1999, and which has expanded to three other countries in the Middle East ever since: Saudi Arabia (Riyadh & Jeddah), United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and Bahrain.

Otlob provides its users with the complete menus of their favorite restaurants, enabling them to order meals online easily and quickly; they can even add comments with their order if they need to be specific about certain details.

Users can also save their favorite orders so as to save time the next times they need to order the same meals, they can order from a number of restaurants at the same time, and set the delivery time of their choice.

Restaurants are organized by category and by the neighbourhoods they serve to, and their latest menus are available on the website for users to choose from.

The interface is very well designed, really simply and easy to use; and it comes in two languages: English and Arabic.

Otlob was developed by LINK Development, and manage by LINKonLINE, both subsidiaries of LINKdotNET, an Orascom company.

# Otlob

Muslim Heritage Images; Manuscripts, Artwork, People & Architecture

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Dubai based Muslim Heritage Consulting recently launched the world’s first Muslim history image library online.

The library, at MuslimHeritageImages.com includes manuscripts from the 10th Century as well as contemporary images of people, architecture and museum artifacts.

Collections telling the story of Muslim civilisation have been brought together from museums, archives and private collections across the world. Many images recreate pivotal moments in history such as pioneering early surgical work carried out in the Middle East centuries before similar treatments were available in Europe.

The images are available for sale as downloads or prints, and with specific usage licenses, mainly a single country and single language licence for commercial users, suitable for print and publication use.

Images are organized by category and searchable by keyword; and detailed descriptions are provided for each image.

# Muslim Heritage Images

Halal Exchange, Marketplace For Global Halal Trade

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Halal Exchange, a unique e-commerce platform aimed at facilitating global Halal trade, will make UAE the preferred hub of the $2.1 trillion-a-year global Halal market (according to Malaysian government estimates in 2007).

With UAE ideally positioned through its infrastructure and telecommunication network and its growing significance as one of the largest re-export centers in the world, Halal Exchange will facilitate the growth of Halal trade, both within the Middle East as well as globally.

Powered by vLinx, a web-based solution, which addresses the challenges of global sourcing, the Halal Exchange makes the costly and complex import-export process as simple as doing business across the street. The Exchange will provide a seamless business platform for the larger retailers and distributors as well as the small and medium-sized companies, which are currently responsible for nearly 80 per cent of the global Halal transactions.

Headquartered in the UAE, Halal Exchange is a joint venture between vLinx Inc. and RAK Investment Authority. The service is free of charge� and accessible to registered clients anywhere in the world.

# Site: Halal Exchange
# Source: Mena Report

B2C E-commerce Study In Four Arab Countries

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A recent analysis by the Arab Advisors Group of e-commerce expenditure in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Lebanon was released recently after studies based on major online and face to face surveys conducted by Arab Advisors Group during 2007.

Total number of e-commerce users in these four countries exceeded 5.1 million people in 2007.

The UAE’s e-commerce users penetration was the highest among the countries studied. The UAE’s e-commerce users’ penetration stood at 25.1%. Saudi Arabia (14.3%) and Kuwait (10.7%) followed while Lebanon had the lowest penetration of e-commerce users with 1.6% of the total population.

The UAE also had the highest average amount spent per capita over one year. As for Lebanon, it had the lowest e-commerce expenditure per capita per year and per month due to a low penetration of e-commerce users in the country. However, Lebanon registered the highest e-commerce expenditure per e-commerce users.

# Press Release: Arab Advisors Group

Mezed, Product Auctions Differently

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MezedMezed is a Tunisian auction site that recently surfaced into the arena of online startups in Tunisia.

A number of Tunisian websites have already attempted to try and push through the idea of online auctions in Tunisia, get it popular, and attempt to make some money out of it. Examples off the top of my head are sites like: MoncefBay and EchriBay.
A lot of these services hang on for a while before fading away into Tunisian internet history. It just seems that the auction model just hasn’t taken off and worked up to now, for one reason or another.

Websites that approach the whole buying/selling thing through small classified ads seem to be doing a little better maybe, but nothing big enough to come close to real e-commerce yet.

Back to Mezed, they take on a new and different approach to the whole auctions system, taking out the sellers and auctioning off partner products themselves. Their system revolves solely around buyers competing to get the auctioned product at a cheap price.

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