A disruptive innovation in the MENA grocery world: Dukkaani seeks $500,000 through funding round via Eureeca.com
Dukkaani, the Pan Arab smart shopping platform, is now seeking $500,000 via their equity crowdfunding campaign on Eureeca. Dukkaani, an Arabic term that means “My Grocery Store”, enables and transforms all grocery shopping stores to sell their products online.
Founded three years ago, Dukkaani have managed (in less than a year) to gain a big market share due to its successful Go-To-Market Strategy which targets the needs of the MENA regions’ grocery shopping culture and lifestyle.
“We are initially targeting the MENA region based on the grocery shoppers culture and lifestyle that reflects on frequent high-volume grocery shopping demand,” explains Faisal Bin Haider, Dukkaani Founder & CEO. “With the MENA grocery market estimated to be worth about $650 billion and with research showing that 10% of the MENA customers willing to use the e-commerce options – a percentage that continues increase – Dukkaani is well placed to capitalise on this market growth.”
The other unique features that earned Dukkaani a competitive advantage over local rivals are the following:
- Developed a high-end and well-established platform using the native device programming for the Smart Devices to provide faster and smoother use for both the seller and the customer App’s.
- Online Payment with Tokenisation: A big advantage for Dukkaani over the others as it supports the e-commerce solutions including the e-Wallet and guarantees the customers with flexibility in payment.
- Driven by Dukkaani’s vision to penetrate the Pan Arab market, the team worked on having a full Arabic Interface and products that earned Dukkaani a big share of the Arabic customers and those customers are found to be the highest spenders.
- Dukkaani provides an Easy and Self – deployed online point-of-sale to any grocery store in the Pan-Arab countries and they can have full control over these points-of-sale to offer their services with a multi-currencies option. This will give Dukkaani a great leap in its growth and will create a big network of grocery stores to provide an excellent service to the customers in their neighbourhoods.
Dukkaani’s vision is to grow into an e-commerce enterprise that has its own fulfilment center for the grocery shopping needs of the consumers. This can take place once the platform has acquired a high number of loyal customers with frequent and confirmed orders that comply with their constant grocery needs.
Automated orders will be created as per patterns from Dukkaani’s own fulfilment center, and controlled via a smart management system and fleet of robots.
As a disruptive innovation, Dukkaani’s vision deploys Artificial Intelligence to relieve the purchaser from the tedious routine of manually managing household necessities to let Dukkaani maintain and build the shopping lists on their behalf, in order to streamline Autonomous Ordering.
The technique deploys AI to deep learning the Big Data of the costumers’ past purchasing habits in order to build data surrounding their shopping patterns, correlations, market trends, as well as their preferences.
Dukkaani will need additional funds to be used for the following:
- Customer Acquisition: As direct costs toward marketing and promoting the application.
- Working Capital: As direct costs toward hiring professional back-office employees to research, develop and handle the current orders in an efficient and effective approach. Domestic Expansion: Entry to other emirates markets, few attempts were made and will continue.
- Regional Expansion: Entry to other markets especially that the platform is designed to adapt to other countries and currencies.
- Product Development: The platform will be developed to automate the grocery shopping for the shoppers based on the household requirements.
- Market Expansion Plan: To achieve Dukkaani’s vision to grow as an e-commerce enterprise by building its own logistics center for the grocery shopping.
There will be many sources of revenues over the long-run that are not only limited to the service fee, these revenue generators include but not limited to the following:
- Service charges of AED3 for every transaction from all retailers
- Delivery charges between AED5 to AED7 for every transaction from the premium retailers which don’t offer the delivery service in-house or that are located in the remote distanced areas.
- Dukkaani is entitled for 3% sales commission on total monthly sales and can increase based on agreed sales slaps with our hypermarket partners.
- Selling promotional spaces on the platform for the FMCG Brands.
Dukkaani have already surpassed their minimum funding target, raising $332,631 (66% of their $500k target) from 31 investors so far.
Their funding round is set to close on 2nd January 2019.