Rethinking Online Retail

The co-founders of new e-commerce platform Idealz – Jad Toubayly and Easa Al Gurg – explain how the company has reimagined the online retail experience, and why customers and charities both have a lot to gain

How does Idealz works and why did you design it that way?

“Online shopping globally and regionally is witnessing momentous growth rates. Yet launching an online store amidst the clutter of titans in the market would be extremely difficult and destined for failure. Our only way to succeed would be to come up with something new and innovative that wasn’t already available in the market.

“We looked at the status quo in online shopping and asked a very simple question: why? Why had the shopping experience not progressed to creating a more compelling proposition for the customer? Why had it remained: select the items you want, put them in your cart, complete checkout and get the items delivered – the end?

“We then started studying incentives used by retailers globally and regionally and found that they are as outdated as the online shopping experience itself.

“Any attempt at boosting sales – be it via discounts or bundles, giveaways, faster delivery time, and so on – always had a inverse relationship with margin. The greater the incentive, the greater the compression on margin. Why did that have to be the case? We believed there was a better way, so we set out to engineer a formula that worked for everyone in the equation and in doing so we came up with Idealz.

“Idealz is for the most part like any other online store, the main difference lies in how we add value above and beyond your typical transaction. The primary aim of our business is to create widespread value, to do this we designed an incentive structure so compelling that a single transaction could not only make the user happy, but also those less fortunate around the world.