A copycat specialist, Rocket Internet has been doing its best to win the online Shopping competition in Iran’s market. Bamilo the first Rocket Internet company in Iran tried to implement the Black Friday Campaign in Iran’s market but it seems it was a black day for Bamilo instead of the Black Friday.
Bamilo: Short Story
Story of Bamilo began nearly two years ago when DigiKala was getting really popular in online shopping. In those days Bamilo spent so much money to get as much as online advertising spaces as it was possible. This strategy tripled the average price of the Banner Ads in Iran’s market. But it wasn’t the end of their efforts, they also worked with online advertising agencies outside of Iran to get the advertising spaces on foreign websites too. So when you opened up your browser from an IP in Iran you would have seen Bamilo’s Ads on most of Iranian and non-Iranian websites. But that time has passed and in recent months, it seems like Bamilo doesn’t have that kind of budget to spend on advertisement anymore.
Culture is Different
Apart from advertisements, it’s obvious that Bamilo doesn’t understand the Iran’s Market too. In their last attempt to run a campaign with the Black Friday theme, they failed to understand that we don’t have Thanksgiving, Black Friday or Christmas Shopping Season in Iran. It’s true that people are familiar with Christmas culture but they don’t know the details, let alone Black Friday. Gift-giving and many other aspects of the Christmas festival have no meaning in this time of year in Iran to most people. Plus, Iran has no official holidays for Christmas, so the whole concept of Christmas Shopping Season and Black Friday is not applicable in Iran’s culture.
One of the main problems of Rocket Internet companies in Iran is that they don’t see the need to understand the culture. They think if they put tons of money on their campaigns and advertisement, they can win the competition. This was probably the first time that people heard about Black Friday in this scale. It was a good educational campaign because many people got familiar with the term “Black Friday”. But in terms of sales, feedbacks and user experience it was a disaster for Bamilo.
Bamilo started to work on the Black Friday campaign a week before. They made a lot of noise about discounts and awesome offers that they would put on their website. Some people waited for these offers for days, and when the day came, offers have finished in the matter of a second. Many people were objecting to these offers that if it’s a lie from Bamilo to get visitors. Some people posted the screen shots of their successful orders that in few minutes or hours turned into unsuccessful ones.
Bamilo’s Point of View
In their blog’s post Bamilo proudly announced that for the first time in history of Iran, Iranians can enjoy Black Friday online shopping. It’s interesting to know that on Saturday Bamilo published a blog post about their Black Friday Campaign. Nearly half of this post was about problems and incidents that online or offline shops have encountered on Black Friday in the past years.
Bamilo claimed on Black Friday they had 15 times as much as visitors in comparison to a normal day. Some specific type of items also sold with the speed of 20 Item Per Second. They also claimed that they had 4 million visitors on Friday.
Stay tuned for serial articles on Rocket Internet companies in Iran.
Update1: We received some feedbacks and we decided to post few screenshots of some tweets. And This is only twitter. These tweets contain the objections and negative feedbacks about Bamilo’s services, offers, unsuccessful and failed orders.
completely agreed with this post , to some extent :
in Iran’s modern culture the last trendy festival that is held is Halloween , to have a great Black Friday you need to catch the money from your buyer’s pocket .this event can be seen near Nowrouz in iran when the people have their Eidi and other benefits of working in their pocket .
i tested their iphone6s offer.it was a bullshit totally
Good luck