Shopping online? Chances are you might get special offers on tickets to a theme park along with the purchase. Or an opportunity to dine at that restaurant you always wanted to try.
UAE’s ecommerce portals are now moving beyond mere discounts to get consumers coming back for more. They are tying up with brands and marketers for offers that are not confined to the merchandise available on the portal. “Cross-selling” is finally showing up on local ecommerce sites, as brands and marketers explore possibilities to be where shoppers are most likely to be found. And these days, that’s mostly in the virtual world. So you had Souq.com offering Dh50 discounts on tickets to IMG Worlds of Adventure with every purchase.
Other portals are getting into the game as well. DubaiBazaar.com, which caters specifically to low-to-mid value, high volume merchandise, confirmed it is exploring cross-selling opportunities and plans to make them available from early next year.
According to Ali Haji, who heads the online division at GCP that owns DubaiBazaar.com, such offers had always been there in the UAE’s online world. But earlier it was through dedicated coupon sites and those offering flash sales. But after building up a high profile within a short span of time, those standalone portals started to fade away by 2014-15.
Now, marketers are exploring possibilities in the ecommerce sites. And unlike coupon-selling portals, ecommerce will be around for a long time.
“The reason why there is cross-selling is that once the basic model is established, it becomes very cost-effective to scale it across [online] platforms,” said Haji. “This is partly a function of ongoing consolidation as well — larger websites are taking over the roles of the more niche players.
“The problem with flash sales — and therefore of coupon sites as an extension — was that online marketplaces started offering the same prices quickly, thereby creating a negative feedback in the mind of the consumer as to the integrity of such sales.”
So what’s in it for the ecommerce portals from hosting cross-selling campaigns? A big plus would be on their cost of operations. “In our case, the offers from brands have been able to offset [our] marketing expenses — reducing marketing and merchandising offer costs by 25-30 per cent on the whole,” said Saad Khan, CEO of Whoopey.com. “The slowdown in footfall during the summer months across Dubai has led to a slight uptake in offerings on online channels. Brands are seeing increased consumer engagement across online ecommerce platforms compared to offline.
“You see a lot of offers in the offline retail channel which consumers are expecting from the online channels too.”
Khan insists that cross-selling represents only a “slight” part of the overall online shopping experience for UAE consumers. It could be that brands and portals are still trying to get a feel of what sort of tie-ins would work and when.
On the IMG Worlds of Adventure tie-in, Souq.com may have got the timing spot on, given that many UAE residents might have stayed put for summer. So discounts on the tickets with any purchase would play well with families thinking of ways to keep their kids engaged.
“Cross-selling is a productive technique to draw audience to a business,” said Roshan Harief, Chief Technology Officer at Glamazle.com, which specialises in beautycare products. “In the case of Souq and IMG, both the platforms cater to an audience of youngsters, adults and family groups.
“In the long run, these campaigns can work well in terms of gaining brand exposure and audience engagement. Brand collaborations help reach a larger audience, especially when the consumer is the same.
“For single-product categories like Glamazle.com, collaborations with similar product category stores can help the brand target specific audiences. If cross-selling campaigns are planned well, it can work wonders for brands.”