A Pakistani living overseas had not visited his native city, Lahore for ten long years, and had been unable to fulfil his spiritual obligation by reciting verses from the Holy Quran at his deceased father’s grave. As circumstances were not allowing this man to visit his father’s grave, he was looking for someone to provide him with a very distinctive service.

With a problem so unique, he approached mamooinpakistan.com, a website specialising in providing unique services to non-resident Pakistanis. Various services like arranging parties and weddings, preparing official government documents, organising last minute mehndi events, or providing for medical care for a sick loved one in need, are all part of the website’s service portfolio.

After taking some time to consider this man’s request, for a fee, the team found the burial site and a cleric was sent to read verses from the Holy Quran at the grave, leaving the customary fresh flowers at the site. To top it all off, they provided photographic evidence to their client that the service he’d requested had been rendered.

“This transaction was so exciting, because it connected us to the customer in a unique and emotional way”, says Mehdi Hasnain, one of the brains behind Tohfay Pakistan, the parent company of ‘Mamoo in Pakistan’.

In 2010, Mamoo in Pakistan was recognised for the rare services it was providing, when it won the ‘Best in Service Innovation’ P@SHA award, a moment Mehdi considers to be a “milestone achievement” for his business. Of course, when your business specialises in providing unique services, you are also going to receive some ‘interesting’ demands.

“We do everything in the proper way, the way it is meant to be done, though we’ve had requests for pictures to be changed on official documents, but we have turned them down. One of the most common yet strange requests is “Yaar mayree fake degree nikalwa dein! (My friend, will you provide us with a fake degree please!)”

Almost as distinctive as the services it provides, is the name of the website itself, which as Mehdi explains, has a story behind it, “A few years ago, when I was unable to come to Pakistan and needed assistance with personal matters, I was constantly calling my mamoo (uncle) for help. While my partners and I were debating over the name of the website, we came to the conclusion that the person you call in Pakistan whenever you need help with anything is your mamoo! Jab aap ko koee kaam hota hay to kis ko yaad kertein hein?” (Who do you call when you need something done?)

Mehdi explains that as the website’s name has a Pakistani flavour, it provides brand retention with their target market, the overseas Pakistanis. This is also true of Tohfay, Pakistan’s first successful e-commerce website. Tohfay.com, which took shape in 2003 as a website that sold local handicrafts and marble chess sets, gradually grew and saw an evolution in its business model. As the target market is mostly non-resident Pakistanis, the pricing model is a little steep when compared to some other websites.

Mehdi, who was living in the United States along with his business partners at that time says, “We realised that gifts from customers in the USA, to friends and family in Pakistan, was a more viable and profitable business. We started with a few products such as cakes and flowers, but quickly our catalogue grew to over 50 products and by 2005, when the business grew, we opened an office and hired a few employees.”

The Tohfay team started thinking outside the box when the unique requests became more frequent. In 2005 a Pakistani customer in the USA, who happened to be a taxi driver, wanted to send a motorcycle to his son in Sukkur for his eighteenth birthday. Then, another customer approached the team wanting to gift a fridge to his family in his home country. In each case when the team received a unique order, their partner, Shahzad Qureshi handled the groundwork in Pakistan. Meanwhile, they also broadened their catalogue with each popular new request, “It grew organically in the first three years. It was very need based.”

This ‘need-based’ growth is somewhat evident in the structure of Tohfay.com today, which on rare occasions suffers from confusing website issues, where product menus are not consistently available on every page and disappear randomly. That being said, the website sports an attractive and intuitive interface overall, and features a neat ‘Gift Finder’ tool, which allows its users to brainstorm gift ideas.

In terms of advertising, Tohfay.com cleverly promoted itself in 2003 on DAWN’s website, which resulted in considerable traffic from overseas Pakistanis looking to consume local news. Later, the team also advertised the website on the international versions of Pakistani TV channels, seen in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. Interestingly enough, the TV ads were produced in-house, “Everything was homemade, including the jingle!”

One of the reasons Tohfay.com grew was because its target market wasn’t alien to conducting transactions online, “We were catering to Pakistanis who weren’t in Pakistan, so e-commerce wasn’t a foreign concept to them. We are glad that they were ready to take that leap of faith with a Pakistani website!”

Today, Tohfay.com continues to see a sizable amount of business, and is run through multiple offices with over 40 employees. Mehdi nostalgically remembers the business’s first order, and how his team poured over every minute detail of the transaction at the time. Today, the story is different, with numerous customer service agents, who Mehdi says are painstakingly trained in providing a fantastic and competent experience.

“When we operate in a volatile city like Karachi, we often face challenges, especially when we commit to deliver flowers and cakes for loved ones at midnight. For everything, we have a contingency plan, so that no matter what, we deliver. That being said, there have been some cases where we have had our Customer Service agents write apology letters for when some deliveries were delayed because of issues beyond our control. There is a reason why our logo has a giant smile, because we have never had a customer who left us without a smile on his face. We will make mistakes, but we will also make up for them.”

It is clear from Mehdi’s words that the actual experience of buying from Tohfay.com is its selling point. The first thing he teaches his customer service agents is that they aren’t merely a courier service that delivers products like TCS, but an ecommerce company that delivers an experience, which starts from its website, continues with its likable customer service staff, and ends with its branded delivery vehicles, which have a giant Tohfay.com smiley logo painted on them.

The Tohfay Pakistan team began with Tohfay.com, expanded with the launch of Mamoo in Pakistan, and is thriving further with a lifestyle products portal, Shopdaily.pk, which unlike Tohfay.com, caters to Pakistanis living in this country. The team’s future plans revolve around improving and evolving their current businesses, rather than expanding into other portals.

Currently all three of the websites that fall under Tohfay Pakistan are short of some fine tuning in terms of web design. Another weakness is that neither Tohfay nor Shopdaily offer what I would consider truly unique products, though Shahzad says that plans are under way to partner with popular brands for the latter.

There is decent competition for Tohfay, especially with new e-commerce websites in Pakistan that are backed by wealthy international investors, such as Daraz.pk, a lifestyle portal offering a higher range of attractive brands when compared with Shopdaily. But Mehdi is confident in the face of new competition, “With all due respect to Daraz.pk, they may have investors from overseas, but they don’t have our experience in the local market. We have a plan, and we are constantly evolving.”

As for why many Pakistani e-commerce players are in stagnation or have gone out of business, Shahzad says, “Other websites haven’t succeeded because they have compromised on the aspects that make an e-commerce website successful. They are essentially digital catalogues. We are in all the way. When you are in the ecommerce business, you have to go all the way and do things the right way.”