Digital Storefronts Level the Playing Field for MENA Retailers

The pandemic resulted in an abrupt shift for many brick-and-mortar retailers, the type that can take decades to achieve, and forced many to move online for the first time.

But for a vast majority of retail merchants in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, who were already underserved from a technology perspective, that massive shift brought new challenges that they couldn’t have prepared for.

Sanad Yaghi, co-founder of United Arab Emirates-based store management platform Dukkantek, told PYMNTS that as eCommerce gained traction in the wake of the pandemic, many merchants looking to sell online were faced with a constant dilemma: “‘How do I manage my online store inventory, as well as my in-store inventory?’”

See also: Is Amazon Looking to Take out Noon in the Middle East?

According to Yaghi, it was an extremely frustrating process of having to manually update their eCommerce websites, which ultimately left a lot of customers unsatisfied with product substitutions and products not being available.

It therefore became rapidly apparent that there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled, and it’s a challenge that Dukkantek has taken on since it launched in 2021.

As Yaghi put it, while larger companies have been at the forefront of eCommerce growth in MENA, Dukkantek is focused on the “the little guys” that need tools and resources to thrive in a digital environment.

The firm does this by providing a fully digital storefront solution that enables small merchants to easily set up and manage eCommerce operations. The platform also allows for a seamless integration between a digital store and a physical retail location so that “just by managing their brick-and-mortar store, [merchants] are simultaneously managing their eCommerce location in real time which makes [day-to-day business operations] super simple,” he explained.

Connecting the Physical, Digital Sales Dots

Beyond stock management, Dukkantek also offers a seamless integration of a broad range of payment options so that clients are not restricted when deciding how to settle their bills.

Online payments are enabled by a standard payment gateway while offline merchants can opt for newer technology such as software point-of-sale (Soft POS) that allows them to accept card payments directly on their mobile phone or NFC device without the need for any additional hardware.

This innovative solution, he said, “reduces the overall cost of having to buy one of those specific mPOS [mobile point-of-sale] devices, making payments more accessible for the vast majority of merchants.”

He added that by providing an all-in-one solution, Dukkantek can bundle all the information that it gathers from merchants’ brick-and-mortar retail locations, such as product count, and display all that in real time on their digital storefronts.

And because the platform connects the dots between physical and digital sales, businesses can get an overview of their entire retail operations, while being spared the time-consuming, manually intensive process of updating their online stock counts or managing a separate eCommerce website.

“With our solution, that basically never happens anymore because they manage it all from one place,” Yaghi said.

Preparing for a Cashless Future

In about 18 months of launch, Dukkantek has managed to scale across seven markets, powering the digital ecosystem for over 10,000 micro-merchants and mom-and-pop shops across the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The Dubai-based startup announced earlier this month that it closed an oversubscribed $10 million pre-Series A funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $15.2 million. That can be considered an impressive feat for a young firm, particularly at a time of growing investor concerns and a retracting investment landscape across the globe.

Read more: UAE Startup Dukkantek Raises $10M to Grow Retail POS System

As Yaghi told PYMNTS, part of the company’s growth has been fueled by the pandemic-induced digital transformation across MENA markets, not to mention the strong push from regulators in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area, including Saudi Arabia and Oman, that are moving toward a cashless economy in the near future.

For Dukkantek’s merchants, this transition to electronic payments means that the next five years will be critical.

“What we’re trying to do is prepare merchants for that future reality and ensure that they have all the tools they need to be able to survive that,” he said.

See also: BNPL FinTech valU Acquires Paynas to Expand Offering in MENA

Moving forward, Yaghi said the money raised will be primarily used for global expansion, that is, to take the company’s solution “from the [MENA] region to the world” because Dukkantek has “a global product and a global solution.”

He also pointed to plans to add new services to Dukkantek’s existing offering, particularly one that the company has identified as the next big problem that needs to be solved for merchants — working capital lending.

“We feel that we can provide immense value on that front, both for our grocery retailers and for our non-grocery retailer,” Yaghi said. “We have a wealth of data to be able to make good lending decisions.”

For all PYMNTS EMEA coverage, subscribe to the daily EMEA Newsletter.