Daily Times

Building a successful e-commerce business is a challenge. Not only do e-commerce stores have to build supply, forecast inventory, manage warehousing and deliver products quickly, they also have to constantly grow the incoming stream of traffic and sales to their store that feeds the system. Keeping the ‘machine’ going is a balancing act and if one part breaks, it impacts all of the other parts.

E-commerce businesses usually operate on low margins, which means to be sustainable or better yet, profitable, a certain scale of traffic and sales has to be achieved. This is a challenge for e-commerce stores, in particular, for newer e-commerce stores that do not have an existing customer base that makes recurring purchases on a regular basis.

To solve this problem, online stores depend on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on platforms such as Google, Facebook and Instagram to reach shoppers that may be interested in their products. This is why you see so many shopping ads on your news feed, it is a popular method of acquiring new customers. PPC advertising is also simple to track and measure, which helps businesses better understand their return on ad spend. This simplicity of performance tracking is one reason that gives PPC advertising an edge over offline marketing.

Digital advertising is big business, $571 billion big to be precise, and could be a trillion-dollar industry by 2030. This is why digital advertising platforms, such as Google and Meta, are some of the largest companies in the world.

Whilst PPC advertising can be an effective marketing tool, it depends on the advertiser to draw value from it. Selecting the right audience and ad artwork is critical to seeing a positive return on ad spend. Most brands and online stores do not have the experience and expertise required to execute a successful large-scale PPC campaign in-house. Hiring digital advertising agencies bridges this knowledge gap, but at a significant additional cost.

This is where Shopsy.pk, a shopping search engine based out of Islamabad comes in. Shopsy helps over 1 million monthly shoppers find the best prices before making product purchases in-store or online. Whilst on one hand Shopsy helps consumers save money, on the other hand, it drives targeted traffic to online stores that advertise on its platform using its native advertising solution called Shopsy Ads. Since Shopsy uses AI to understand user intent, no audience targeting is required making PPC campaigns very simple to run.

Commenting on the success of the platform thus far, Usama Arjumand, Shopsy’s CEO, said “We have signed up over 60 advertisers and have served 50 million ads to our users since the launch of Shopsy Ads in March 2022”

According to Usama, Metro Shoes has seen a 7x return on ad spend while Allure Beauty has received half a million impressions in the first 2 weeks of their Shopsy Ads campaign.

The digital advertising market is growing quickly and certainly has the potential to reward new innovations. Time will tell how effectively Shopsy is able to scale its userbase, attract advertisers to its platform and expand beyond borders.