Saleem Renoui, CEO of Sell Abroad, discusses regional consumer demand and religious cultural factors shaping e-commerce in the Middle East.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Renoui: MENA e-commerce features 50% lower CPMs, higher AOV, and higher LTV
“So the market in the MENA, you have almost 50% less CPMs, your AOV is much higher, your LTV is much higher.”
Opinion
Renoui: Aggregators globally bought brands without category consolidation
“I definitely think it's a global issue. I mean, there's Razio in North America. They've raised, I believe a hundred million dollars and it's the same thing, right? They don't have consolidation. When it comes to categories on their e-commerce brands, all aggre…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Renoui: Manscaped Clone Blue Generates $20M Annually in Saudi Arabia
“So Manscaped, it had a, basically a copy-paste competitor here in this region called Blue, and all they did was create the same product, Create the same marketing material, but localized it with some, you know, Arabic comedy style, and it blew up, and that com…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Renoui: US tariffs will go away within three to six months
“I think they will go away within the next, you know, three to six months.”
Insight
Saleem Renoui: E-commerce brands should keep operating expenses below 8%
“I mean, e-commerce, you should be sub eight percent at all times”
Insight
Saleem Renoui: E-commerce brands can avoid expense SaaS by building internal dashboards
“I don't think it's a Big thing that you need to have from an external vendor. I think this is something that you can easily build internally. It depends on how much time you have as an operator or who you have on your team, but there's many tools that pull dat…”