Market experts discussed recovery trend, consumers’ attitude, online spending

By Jamil Khan | DUBAI

The experts from various leading companies including Epson, CASIO and others said these during IDRF Meetup held in AstroLabs, Dubai recently. The seminar was organized by 24TTL, an AI-based e-commerce analytics platform for enterprise brands to monitor the performance of digital shelves, creating a seamless and omnichannel buying process for online shoppers.
Yury Shishkin CEO 24TTL said that “Over the last 20 years, online retail has evolved a lot as an industry because of its rapid growth. Yet, in that very same time span, the user experience websites offer hasn’t changed much if we analyze the way customers compare, search and explore products today”. For him, the giant Amazon is a good example of this — the marketplace’s product detail pages have hardly adapted to today’s needs since the times when only books were sold on the platform.
“Yet the shopping experience as we know it today was only introduced two years ago due to strong consumer growth and the imperative need to survive in a crowded market,” he said.
A very good example of both is the MENA region, which since 2019, has seen its eCommerce grow faster than any other region in the world (by 18% interannual, twice the world’s average), with an estimated 209 million consumers transitioning to online shopping during the height of the pandemic.
For the very same reason, there are companies like CASIO looking for softwares and technologies that will make sense for their eCommerce strategy.
“Casio is at the very beginning of its ecommerce journey. The main challenge today is what software to choose to adapt with the littlest headache possible, for both clients and developers”, said Aboud Khederchah during the IDRF Meetup, CASIO’s head of marketing for the MENA region.
For Aboud, finding good, reliable suppliers is also very difficult, which is why try and error is the only method to compare. Yet he highlights that entrepreneurs and managers need to understand the reason for such purchases. “We always ask ourselves: why are we using a certain technology? Do people use it or need it?”
Another challenge ahead is the cookie-less era. By the end of 2024, Google plans to shut third-party cookie tracking. For many, it will be a reason to get more creative than before, especially when getting data, says Emanuele Corso, EPSON’s e-commerce manager for the MENA region.
“The cookie-less era will make us get creative with getting data. We will have to get creative on convincing people to register and leave their contact information”, he stated.
When asked about his vision on the state of the MENA market, Emanuele said, “There has to be structural development in many countries. Many of them don’t have big e-commerce players, and we need to think about how we can support them in their online journey?”
-Published At The Gulf Today