JEDDAH: Saudi fashion e-commerce platform Nejree has secured $15 million to fund the expansion of a service allowing customers to try goods on at home before buying them.
The money was from Saudi venture capital fund Impact46 and brings the total that Nejree has raised so far to $19 million, after it was awarded $4 million in December 2019.
Founded in 2018 by Ibrahim Al-Mogren, Nejree originally sold footwear but has since expanded into clothing. It sells brands such as Adidas, Nike, Lacoste, Puma, Under Armour, Reebok and Converse.
Its new element is Nejree Closet, which is a free service where customers can try on footwear or clothes at home before they commit to a purchase.
Nejree Closet has so far shipped around 100,000 items and the company said the addition had resulted in a 50 percent increase in the average order value.
“We have released five different versions of app updates in less than 60 days to deliver the Nejree Closet experience at scale. A whole ecosystem is very critical for the success of this service,” Al-Mogren said. “We are investing tremendously in the whole in-house supply chain and infrastructure from logistics, operations, real-time updates and automation.”
The CEO said he believed the try now buy later model would soon become mainstream among e-commerce portals, especially in the clothing sector.
According to a recent study conducted by analytics company SAS, almost half (48 percent) of consumers in Saudi Arabia will continue to use online shopping and banking more than they did before COVID-19, even as the pandemic abates.
The study indicated that 75 percent of the respondents have permanently changed their shopping habits as a result of the pandemic, while only 17 percent of consumers in the Kingdom expect to return completely to how things were before.
New digital consumers increased 27 percent in the MENA region since the pandemic, the highest of any region surveyed, SAS said. More than half of the respondents (56 percent) are digital channel users, which is also the highest rate in any region.
Revenue in the Saudi e-commerce market is projected to reach $7.05 billion in 2021, according to data firm Statista.
The numbers are expected to show an annual growth rate of 5.38 percent in the coming years, resulting in a projected market volume of $8.69 billion by 2025.
