About two years ago, somewhere in 2015 when Daraz.pk led by Muneeb Mayar set up itself as Pakistan’s debut e-commerce platform, they were at the stage as traditional e-commerce channel with the key highlight of COD payment functioning on the inventory based business strategy.
Although several people have tried earlier to daraz arrival, none of them used the COD USP the mode Daraz did previous to that phase which eventually helped Daraz.pk becoming the top e-commerce torchbearer in Pakistan but also helped Pakistan’s still beginner e-commerce industry to set up as trustworthy complement to the traditional retail channel.
By the end of 2015, when Daraz.pk nattily used Black Friday as a marketing trick to create not just Daraz climb to the top of the online pyramid but also approved Black Friday as a big retail juncture for Pakistani consumers.
The above preface is not to rant about the evident achievement of Daraz, rather it is to draw attention to the abrupt emergence of e-commerce hit stories which smooth the way for further demanding e-commerce players such as mygerry’s.com , Yayvo.com, goto.com, and ishopping.com. Currently, every one of these e-commerce sites has assembled an impressive substitute retail channel which wasn’t accessible to their patrons prior to 2014/15.
With the comparative success and nonstop escalation of online sales, Mobile phones have been the top product category which has been at the forefront of giving growth to these online stores. Apart from clothing, the next highest sales level at these e-commerce platforms have come from Mobile phones and its related accessories. In nutshell, it seems that the Pakistani nation loves to purchase their cell phones from online stores.
In last 10 years, Pakistan cell phone industry has witnessed extensive progress stages with double-digit growth. At the moment about 1.6 million mobile phones out of them 45% are smartphones and 55% are feature phones being sold in Pakistan every month. So taking this massive volume in consideration the e-commerce platform role looks like peanuts approximately less than 4% volume input alongside more traditional sales channel including conventional trade channel covering on retailer and wholesaler along with recent retail and enterprises sales channel.
Verdict
So it demonstrates for all the hype adjacent to online sales as huge warning against the domination of conventional trade, e-commerce platforms still have to go all along way prior to even the following something like have happened in India’s phone industry, where online sales currently amount to 30% of total sales approaching from all channels.
