Dubai: India’s mobile coupon and discount marketing platform mydala.com is entering the crowded UAE market as part of its international expansion plan.
The e-commerce start-up, launched in 2009, provides deals and offers on grocery, entertainment, restaurants, travel, spas and salons, gyms and other categories.
Speaking to Gulf News from New Delhi, Anisha Singh, CEO and Founder of mydala.com, said the opportunity in the retail market in Dubai is more exciting as the businesses here are more advanced and professional.
“The plans are obviously to conquer the Dubai market and become the favoured marketing platform for businesses,” she said.
The company claims to offer deals from more than 150,000 merchants in India and claims to have 14 million registered users across 200 cities. It claims to do 220,000 transactions a day.
The company does not hold any inventory of the products and acts more like a deals marketplace. It has opened a small office in Al Qusais Industrial Area.
In this market the company would be competing with the likes of Groupon, Cobone, Voucher Codes UAE and Big Discounts UAE among others.
Some of the Dubai merchants on board are Cha Cha Chai, Chicking, Filli cafe, Sharaf DG, Swasthya Ayurveda, Tim Hortons, etc. “We were labelled like a Groupon but there is real need for merchants to market themselves. We also realised that mobile is central to people. In 2011, we started participating with all the telecom operators in India and what it did for the company was that 83 per cent of the audience that mydala gets now is from mobile phones,” Singh said.
She said that everything on mydala is based on data analytics. From 2009, the company has been crunching data to know what the users want.
“80 per cent of mydala audience is pull-based and we don’t push notifications and spam people. Our investment into analytics enables us to focus on consumers with relevant promotions and give offers closer to them, leveraging location-based services,” she said.
Riding high on the e-commerce wave, she said that today’s discount coupons play a significant role in attracting customers and has the potential to grow further.
When asked whether mydala is sufficiently funded for international expansion, she said that the company has so far raised close to $20 million and currently in no need for further funding.
“We are a profitable company for the last two years. All our profits are pushed into the business to grow the territory. If the Dubai launch is successful, then we will launch in couple of more countries in the next four to six months. We have already started looking at two more markets such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” she said.
