Digikala, a domestic prototype of Amazon in Iran and one of the country's leading startups, has published its annual report that casts light on Iran’s e-commerce seen in the previous Iranian year that ended in March 2020.
The report is released by the online store’s Business Intelligence Department, providing insights into the behavior of Iranian consumers while shopping online.
According to the startup, the data can help Iranian producers working with Digikala to optimize supply and retail.
In addition, producers around the country not working with Digikala can also use the data to modify their supply chain, retail and marketing systems. It also helps economic policymakers identify and fulfill the infrastructural and transit needs of these systems.
According to the report, Digikala’s website had over 26 million visitors per month, making it the most popular online shop in Iran. In the last fiscal year, the shop’s online shelves showcased over two million goods offered by over 61,000 local suppliers.
According to the figures, each purchase price averaged 4.96 million rials ($22.5).
The shop’s website received 5.4 million visits per day, each averaging around five minutes. Every day, the shop added an average of 3,000 products, increasing the total number of products to 2.2 million.
Some 12,000 new customers created accounts on the shop’s website and the number of daily orders placed on the website reached 300,000 during the fiscal 2019-20.
The highest and lowest number of orders were placed respectively in December 2019 and April-May 2018.
Based on the report, the three most favorite products among Digikala’s customers were smartphones, headsets and videogame consoles.
The capital city of Tehran is home to the highest number of Digikala customers, followed by Alborz and Yazd provinces.
The report shows that the Net Merchandise Value of Digikala has registered a 112% growth year-on-year on average in the past eight years.
The last year’s figures show that the online shop’s NMV registered a 156% growth compared to the year before.
Digikala is an online marketplace, a secure and transactional website where selected suppliers can sell their products or services to buyers. Buyers' transactions are processed by a marketplace operator and usually delivered by the supplier.
It was launched 12 years ago when two brothers, Hamid and Saeed Mohammadi, were looking for a digital SLR camera in Tehran's electronics bazaar, at the Hafez and Jomhouri junction. The camera body was new but its lens turned out to be secondhand, leading the two Mohammadi brothers to start Digikala from a small two-room apartment in central Tehran.
They built the company from scratch, promoted entrepreneurship in the country and paved the way for other startups, and managed to create thousands of direct and tens of thousands of indirect employment opportunities.