Khalil Mabrouk - Istanbul
The spread of the emerging corona virus, "Covid 19," has transformed most service systems in the world into digital technologies, promoted a culture of remote shopping in many countries, and created new business opportunities for "serious intermediaries".
In the Turkish city of Istanbul, young Syrians invested in people's desire to practice field shopping from inside their homes to provide a special service for remote shopping, but with the real eye through the live broadcast of the exhibits.
With each morning, Ahmed Saeed is heading with a team of colleagues to the popular markets in Istanbul, "Bazaars", and depicts their exhibits, and then displays the videos on special Facebook accounts and WhatsApp groups called "Everyday Bazaar".
The bazaars in Istanbul were known mainly because of their low prices, the wide variety of exhibits, and the stability of their weekly appointments in each neighborhood, but many people are reluctant to reach them today to achieve calls for "social divergence" as a way to avoid infection with the Corona virus.
Sk and change
The idea of direct broadcasting of the exhibits embodies the importance of flexibility in transforming businesses and small projects to adapt to conditions in a rapidly transforming world, as Saeed owned a medical tourism company in Turkey, but decided to search for another project after tourism and travel stopped in the whole world after the spread of Corona pandemic.
Saeed said to Al Jazeera Net that once he was guided by the idea of photographing the market and presenting it in videos to the buyers, he conducted a study that takes into account his ability and the team that helps him to meet the customer's need. Among them as a shopping center, and from there began to follow the bazaar sites every day.
| Food items shown in pictures showing prices from one of the shops in Istanbul through the service of every day Bazaar (social media sites) |
Price incentive
The owner of the "Everyday Bazar" service believes that the Arab community in Turkey and even many Turks still do not like financial transactions through electronic applications, which gave his idea attractive to customers who prefer to receive the goods and pay on their bill.
It also confirms that this system of selling has given people the opportunity to buy cheap bazaar goods while they are sitting in their homes, fearing the transmission of the Corona virus infection to them if they enter the bazaars known to be crowded in them.
"A lot of people are now without work, so they are looking to buy goods at low prices, and the bazaars save them a lot of money. They buy half of the value of what they can buy with electronic applications from outside the bazaar."
Ahmed and his team started their simple project through a Facebook page and a funded advertisement that delivered them to a reasonable audience, then they created WhatsApp contact accounts for customers wishing to shop through their group, as they photographed the markets with their mobile phone cameras, uploaded videos to these groups, and then recorded orders that Customers choose it and deliver goods to their homes in Ahmed's private car for a known percentage of each bill.
In addition to the bazaars, the service provides an opportunity to shop from the major shops that sell dry supplies, cans, meat, cheese, oils and other goods.
| The "Everyday Bazar" service team goes daily to the popular bazaars in Istanbul to photograph products and display them to customers on electronic applications (Al Jazeera) |
Quality assurance
In addition to the low cost, this form of shopping benefits buyers to overcome the problems of poor quality purchases that they order sometimes or ignorance of its exact type at other times.
One of the clients of "Every Day Bazaar" told Al-Jazeera Net that before that he had a lot of problems in the type of purchases he was ordering with the icon, especially the vegetables and fruits that many of its varieties used to have specifications other than the ones he wanted.
"This type of service - direct broadcast - allows you to ask for something that you see after you are sure it matches your needs. You buy what you want and not what is there," he added.
And spread in the city of Istanbul alone 358 bazaars distributed on weekdays, including 243 on the European side and 115 in the eastern part of "Anatolia" of the city.
According to the references on the history of the bazaars, they were markets that had existed since the Byzantine era, and Muslims maintained them as a tradition of shopping and stimulating internal trade after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 AD and changed its name to Istanbul.