Persian New Years Shopping Is Going Online Part 1

Numbers are higher than ever. Only a week to the Persian new year of 1395, online sales are spiking compared to previous years on the new year shopping season.

Like in every culture around the world, new years shopping is a special part of the whole new year joy. Discounts, new products, holiday merchandises and more discounts, are all parts of this shopping culture. The Iranian “Haft Sin” is tabletop arrangement of 7 symbolic items, which can be seen in every Iranian’s house at the Persian new year of Norouz. Interestingly even the Haft Sin can be purchased online and delivered to your home. This shows the rapid growth of online shopping within the Iranian culture.

In all the traffic and the rush before every new year, e-commerce platforms seize the opportunity to relieve the holiday buyers of these problems. E-commerces now are competing directly with offline shops not only in ease of access, fast delivery and more options, but in prices! The fierce battle of Norouz as we name it, has created an intense price competition between Iran’s leading e-commerce platforms, which has created jaw dropping prices that one would never find by going to the bazaar.

We talked to families and students that do the Norouz shopping annually about how they buy now. Many never even had a single online purchase less than two years ago. The majority of the people we asked are buying at least a single item of their Norouz shopping cart online, and a family has bought all of their Norouz shopping list from DigiKala and Bamilo (The two e-commerce platforms in a deathmatch on this year’s shopping season). TV  and large highway banner ads by e-commerce companies and other startups were first seen in the past persian year for the first time indicating the high growth online shopping in the past years, especially this year.

While it is too early to give numbers of items sold in the past weeks, and how much it will be in this upcoming week until the new Persian year, but all estimations point to 3 digit percentage growth in number of online sales in this period comparing to last year or any other holiday season in Iran. We will be taking a close look on the Norouz sales until the end of the holidays on April 1st.