1 - 7 November 2001
Issue No.558
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 1 - 7 November 2001 Issue No.558 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Online and on-form
Reem Leila discovers the bliss - and limits - of online shopping
Tired of struggling through sweaty crowds in the heat of a Cairo shopping mall? Now you can buy anything and have it sent to yourself, a friend, or a relative from any place in the world, with just a click of your mouse. Now you can go to an online shop that sells everything you could possibly need. Now you can buy flower bouquets, gifts, clothes, medicine, books, or even furniture from the comfort of your desk. This may not be news in most of the world: but in Egypt, it most definitely is.
Most people think this new service a major leap forward. It spares them the time and travail of shopping in a highly congested city such as Cairo where just moving about can be arduous. Yet online shopping is not yet the boon it could be. Many people still have a long way to go before fully recognising plastic money. They continue to believe that it is a dangerous way to shop, as there is no legal comeback when things go wrong. And that puts online retailers in a bind.
Enter egyptpresents.com. This Egyptian Web site is the first to offer online transactions of almost anything, delivered quickly to your door.
Like any simple click-of-the-mouse process, clients only need select the item they want to purchase and enter basic information in the order form. Clients must know the details: code number, colour, and size. And that's it.
For convenience sake, online shoppers can pay by cash on delivery or by credit card. All Egypt- based commodities are delivered in 48 hours, while overseas imports are delivered within 10 days.
Launched in December 1999, egyptpresents.com has been growing rapidly. Less than two years after launch, they have grown to cover all Egypt's governorates. According to its founders, egyptpresents.com has so far received over 100,227 visitors, without any marketing campaigns except for advertisements on free Internet sites. Egyptpresents.com offers several benefits to its buyers, such as 10 per cent discounts and monthly gifts for regular visitors. These fillips are designed to keep visitors coming back for more.
According to one of the site owners, Amr Soliman, most visitors are either young or expatriate Egyptian men who want to send presents, books, or medicine to their families.
The site gets 100 new visitors a month who order commodities worth between LE11 and LE800. The site offers a unique service, which is the ability to build a wishlist from the preferred items on egyptpresents.com. A customer can log on to a friend's wish list, (if the friend has entered the details), and buy him or her their heart's desire.
According to Soliman, the problem of securing clients' credit cards has been solved since "day one". Egyptpresents.com had credit card clearance ever since it was launched, he said. Mutual trust is crucial in the online shopping business, argues Soliman. "We have installed the necessary software to run a Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) system. It is a specially designed security procedure to guard shopping online. This system, which cost a fortune, was introduced to our ordering system by an international software company. The international company was incubating my small company for eBS (e-business), so it provided me with the SET system. That is why we are nearly the only shopping Web site in Egypt that has this facility," Soliman added. "If we fail in building trust, our business will come to an end before we even start."
Yasser Saad, owner of a tourism company, believes egyptpresents.com has saved him a lot of time. Usually, he needs to compliment his important clients by buying them gifts. "I was either asking my wife to do this boring mission for me, or doing it myself. I found it a chore because I lacked the time. Now I can buy whatever I want from the site and send it to whomsoever I want, without wasting time," says Saad.
Online customers differ from their traditional counterparts, who still want to go, see, and touch commodities. Internet clients are those who do not have time to go shopping, and want to send a present, while getting on with something else.
But for shopping on other sites, payment remains a problem. So far, Banque Misr is the only bank to issue special credit cards for shopping via the Internet. The maximum limit on these cards is US$300. Other banks issue ordinary international visa credit cards, though they could be used for shopping online; but many of those banks have banned Internet transaction, due to the lack of the legal procedures, and the high cost of the SET system, which they don't have. According to Ibrahim Gad'un, manager of the visa card section in Banque Misr, if any client wants to increase the maximum limit of his Internet credit card, it is done on his own responsibility. The bank requires such clients to write a declaration, by which any fraudulent transaction via the Internet which the client knows nothing about, is his responsibility, not the bank's. "The maximum limit on such Internet credit cards is $3,000. The Bank does not have the financial capabilities to install the SET system, as the number of all credit card holders is less than 400,000 all over Egypt. Only 1.02 per cent of the population has the Internet visa card. Therefore, it is ridiculous to introduce such an expensive system for this very small percentage," argues Gad'un.
Otlob.com is another site which offers shopping online. They deliver flowers, medicine, video films, food and groceries. They only cover Cairo and Alexandria. They started in 1999.
It is perhaps ironic that most creators of online shopping sites still believe that there is no real online shopping in Egypt. Ahmed Helmy, operation manager of otlob.com, says the concept of online shopping should be interpreted according to the "nature" of Egyptian society. "Shopping online only serves a limited number of Internet users in Egypt. So, why should I insist on lowering the number more by insisting on online payment?" he asks. Even those very few who have credit cards are mostly unwilling to make their credit card numbers known online. "There should be an Egyptian concept of shopping online, as the number of credit card holders is small. Introducing the SET software requires a huge sum of money, and a massive number of clients, in order to cover its expenses," says Helmy. The Egyptian market, he concludes, is not yet prepared for the use of credit cards. According to Helmy, it is the bank's responsibility to market the cost of clearance machines, and to encourage Egyptians to use them. This idea was completely rejected by a source, who asked for anonymity, in Banque Misr. "Of course it is not our responsibility. It is the job of merchants to ask for such machines." And until someone takes on responsibility for this, online shopping seems to be the exclusive domain of egyptpresents.com, thanks to their miraculous SET.
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