Over the last three years, dozens of incubations, accelerators and startups have been launched in Pakistan mainly focusing on filling the gaps in our e-commerce industry whose market in terms of revenue income is said to have expanded to an estimated $1.6 billion in 2019 with projected to reach USD$ 3 Billion and expected to show an annual growth rate of about 16% year on year. Source – Statista
The E-Commerce industry has a predominant contribution to Pakistan’s GDP with a worldwide growth rate of 13%, and it is escalating with a phenomenal strategy of making lives easy. The new markets in e-commerce are emerging, whereas existing markets are innovating themselves to grow.
With an Exponentially growing E-commerce market size in Pakistan, the supporting E-commerce solutions have also picked up the pace to lift E-commerce. A Pakistani Serial Entrepreneur, M. Bilal Jamil who recently launched Pakistan’s first of its kind E-commerce analytic tool, “Z-commerce by Shoppingum” which potentially can be a game-changer for the E-commerce industry in Pakistan and open up the doors to make E-commerce more transparent, fair and competitive. The tool is reported to have Real-time data of millions of products from 100s of online stores.
Bilal Jamil, who is founder and CEO at Shoppingum, said, “We’ve been working on this tool for very long and it was a great challenge to develop such a tool in a country like Pakistan, where E-commerce is rapidly emerging but not fully emerged. We haven’t made the tool public yet, as we’re looking to patent the technology. Although, we are open to provide custom services to our clients. We are offering free Marketing consultancy for the Startups in Pakistan, as for me, it’s heart-wrenching to see great ideas shutting down just because of poor marketing strategies”
The tool will operate under the newly launched marketing agency, “Go Viral” (which is also owned by Bilal) and will serve only clients/partners to get a competitive edge over the competitor.
The “Z-Commerce by Shoppingum” claimed to have the following feature in the beta version:
1) Access to data of millions of products sold online in Pakistan on hundreds of eCommerce websites
2) Complete list of your competitors’ products/inventory
3) Import products/inventory names, images, descriptions, Just on a click
4) Real-time comparison of price yours and your competitor’s product listing. So, you can remain always ahead in the competition
5) Real-time google ranking (you and your competitors on the main keyword)
Shoppingum has just launched Z-commerce with some of the basic features and plans to expand the scope of the services which could contribute an important role to pick up the E-commerce industry up the ladder. Shoppingum has a great record even before to bring innovative E-commerce solutions in Pakistan to cater to the uttermost need of the customers. During the peak of the Covid-19 breakout in Pakistan in late April, Shoppingum had come up with a Realtime Shopping Search Engine which helped the Consumers to search grocery, mobile phone prices, and electronics to shop online from the nearby Online Stores. That was massively appreciated across the mainstream media and the service was used by millions of users.
Pakistan being on 5th on the population size holds an E-commerce potential beyond imagination and all we need for now is to move in the right direction, to create innovative solutions that can make the market more competitive, which can result in pacing up the growth and can revive the faith of an average consumer.
The struggle is real, but the challenges and hurdles are ahead to come. The future is not what we can accurately predict, but affirmative determination can lead to future success.