el Grocer, the UAE based grocery app is announcing today the launch of an Arabic version of their app. The updated app will be the first Arabic grocery app available in the UAE.
el Grocer is a mobile-first delivery app. The premier Dubai based delivery app. They have garnered most of their notoriety because of the successful fundraising campaign on Eureeca earlier this year, which made them the biggest crowdfunded company in the Middle east and North Africa. They have recently expanded into Abu Dhabi and have planned an aggressive growth strategy into the whole UAE and the rest of the region by next year.
el Grocer’s Founder & CEO, Nader Amiri, commented on this new launch: “Today’s launch is just the next step in our goal to make life easier for people. This is the future, and it is in line with other similar efforts made by Facebook, Alibaba and Google. More and more people are coming online , but they find that most of the internet isn’t made for them so they can’t take advantage of all the benefits we get from an interconnected world with peer-to-peer communication. But now they can, no more traffic, no more lines at the supermarket. With el Grocer you get free delivery, to your front door in 60-minutes and now you can get it by using a Arabic app.”
With this new move, el Grocer is going after a previously untapped segment in the booming grocery delivery app market.
Online shopping is experiencing global year after year growth worldwide. While the GCC countries still trail behind the world average in online sales, online retail represented only 2% of all retail sales in the region, last year .
But there is one segment where the Middle East leads, and that is online grocery shopping numbers. This growth of “e-groceries” combined with the increased penetration and adoption of mobile first service by millennials across all social classes may have left a blind spot in the market that most major retailers ignore. A blind spot that el Grocer plants to capitalise on with their new Arabic grocery app . The bilingual app is an iOS exclusive for the moment.
Nader continued: “We want to democratise online services and make them accessible to everyone. For this to happen, engaging with an audience that prefers to speak and use an Arabic app is a crucial first step for any people-centric company has to undertake. So it makes sense from a business point of view, but it’s also a duty, a responsibility even, to not allow such obstacles to exist in your services, your company and your society.