HiDubai, Region’s #1 Business Discovery Platform, launched a new feature, “HiDubai Deals” to help customers find deals, discounts, and offers on their favourite brands from local stores and malls. A feature of this magnitude with map-enabled discovery, powered by AI-search capabilities, is one of its kind in the region. It aggregates all offline discounts & promotions from multiple brands across Dubai on a single platform.
His Excellency Abdul Baset Al Janahi, Member of Board of Directors of Tejuri Com LLC that runs HiDubai.com, said, “Dubai is a renowned shopping hub for residents and tourists alike. Our research in the past indicated a lack of information flow between the retail community and customers. There had been a surge of couponing and deal platforms circa 2008-2012 to solve this problem. We observed that such a model covers only a tiny portion of retailers who continuously offer deep discounting. The idea is sold to them under the pretext that the customers make repeat purchases.
With the growth of global e-commerce, users were shifting to e-commerce apps to discover products. In 2020, the e-commerce market was 8% of the retail sector in UAE. On the other hand, offline retailers were offering competitive deals to counter deep discounting by e-commerce platforms. Unfortunately, the complexity and cost of taking this information to customers continued to be a practical challenge for retail businesses. We realised that there is a scope to address the “offline deal discovery” challenge faced by 92% of the retail sector.
To address this customer need, we introduced this new feature intending to enable offline retail transactions. Initially, during the MVP phase, the feature was retail customer-centric. However, we ended up solving a more significant challenge faced by retailers by offering a technology-enabled model to broadcast their deals, discounts, and offers.
HiDubai engineering team initially approached this feature from a low-effort-high-impact point of view, leveraging open-source frameworks to ship the feature faster. We launched the MVP a few months back and constantly listened to our users to build this feature and eventually coded 80% of the feature in-house. We experimented with Algolia to create an AI-enabled search engine for this feature, where users can discover deals by brand, store, malls, and even location. This worked out quite well, in addition to being the first-ever map-based deal discovery platform. During the beta stage, we could generate over 900K visitors that benefitted over 3,000 retailers in Dubai.”
A wide range of categories is available on HiDubai Deals to help users discover all types of brands on sale. It also has a location-based search that allows users to find all the offers around their location.
Behind the scenes, HiDubai Team invests a lot in field efforts to keep the content fresh and relevant. Each offer goes live with a validity period, detailed description, brand information, and GPS-enabled store location. This feature is updated daily to ensure that shoppers never miss a sale! On an average day, shoppers can find 700 discount offers to choose from.
Retailers who want to use this facility need to claim their business on HiDubai through a simple 2-minute process. If interested, visit hidubai.com, search for your business, and click on ‘Claim Your Business.’ You will be able to post offers on HiDubai Deals as soon as the claim is verified.
