If you live in the Middle East, you’d think traditional businesses. Oil, shipping, logistics, transport, agriculture, automobile, real estate, and pretty much anything that involves trade with local businesses or individuals or both. Have you thought how things might change with Ecommerce in the Middle East? Not many people have.
The story is the same all over the world.
But we ask this:
Why think local?
Ecommerce in the Middle East has been growing strong and steadily. According to Go Gulf the total estimated number of Internet users in the Middle East is pegged at 90 million and counting, only 15% of businesses in the Middle East have an Internet presence. The B2C Ecommerce sales touched $15 billion in 2015 (an increase of 9 billion in the year 2012) and that was still a couple of years ago. As we are all well aware, things have skyrocketed since then!
Thanks to the Internet and the overwhelming reach of the Internet, you could start a business with almost nothing but an ecommerce website and semi-automate your business operations using technology. Plus, you could choose to live in the Middle East and run your business from there. However, you could make it a completely global business if you wanted to.
Or you could make it only local, if that’s how you want to crack the egg. The options are totally up to you, and what best suites your niche choice and design. )We are more than happy to help you out with this, just contact us for free here!)
The dropshipping business model, for instance, lends itself as a completely virtual, semi-automated, global (or local) and ridiculously simple business for you to run while you live in the Middle East. For all practical purposes, you could really live and run your business from anywhere.
If you want to, you could even launch your business elsewhere (in the United States or European markets) while you still live in Middle East and run your business that way.
There are three routes you’d take when looking to start with Ecommerce in the Middle East:
Ecommerce (Local, National, or Global): Find your suppliers, setup an Ecommerce store to sell your products, and choose to sell locally, nationally or globally.
Dropshipping (Local, National, Global): Bypass the pure ecommerce model, start a dropshipping business in the Middle East, find suppliers, setup agreements with your suppliers to ship locally to your customers, showcase your suppliers’ products, and sell online.
Dropshipping Globally: Setup your Ecommerce in the Middle East but sell your suppliers’ products anywhere in the world. For instance, you could sell products only to customers in the United States while you don’t have an actual presence there.
No matter how you slice and dice it, you can run a completely virtual business. If you don’t want to follow the usual popular pathway to run a dropshipping ecommerce business — say a Shopify Store + Oberlo + AliExpress — you can also choose build up your local supplier base in your locale, setup a Shopify store, and still do dropshipping.
You might want to work from home and start a business on your kitchen sink. It doesn’t mean that you’d want to pile up your opportunity cost by doing odd jobs online or offline. Thanks to Ecommerce and/or dropshipping, absolutely anyone can start a global business that’s completely location independent.
The key is to start your Ecommerce business or dropshipping business the right way, position your business as a premium brand, and target the right audience.
Do you think that the dropshipping business model is the best way to start a modern, virtual, and a low-cost way to start a business? Tell us about it, be sure to follow Dropaship here on Medium for all of our awesome content coming up!
Originally published at www.dropaship.com on August 24, 2017.
