KARACHI: Black Friday (or white if you like) is becoming an increasingly popular shopping day in Pakistan, especially for online shoppers.

The numbers tossed about by the online shopping sites in Pakistan — which couldn’t be verified independently — paint a pretty rosier picture of the country’s e-commerce market.

Daraz.pk, a venture of German tech company Rocket Internet, claimed it chalked up Pakistan’s first Rs1 billion sale in its annual Black Friday event on Nov 25. The site surged past last year’s sale and traffic records just a few hours into the sale, with orders equalling two regular days’ figure in the first 10 seconds of the sale, it said in a statement.

“Reaching Rs1bn in sales on a single day is a milestone not only for Daraz, but for all of Pakistan,” said Bjarke Mikkelsen, co-CEO of Daraz Group. “Ecommerce is no longer a small part of the market, but a cornerstone of the retail market.” Daraz said 55pc of the total orders came from a mobile device, an indication of how Pakistan is increasingly a mobile-first market.

Yayvo, an online marketplace by courier service TCS, launched its Black Friday sales early on Nov 18. It received more than 60,000 orders worth Rs200m during the week through Nov 25, it said. Commenting on the early launch, TCS E-COM CEO Salman Hasan said in a statement: “The world usually celebrates Black Friday a day after Thanksgiving. Since we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here, there’s no reason why Black Friday can’t be the second Friday of November, instead of the last.”

The company said its Black Friday was not just about great discounts; fast delivery was also a major aspect. “Over 1,500 phones were delivered in just 120 minutes,” it said. The website, which received six million visits during the shopping festival, said it threw in discounts of more than 50m; bikes were sold out within 15 minutes and over 200 PlayStation 4 game consoles sold out within 30 minutes.

Another e-commerce site Homeshopping.pk, which focuses on electronics, marketed the event as White Friday instead of Black Friday and enticed customers with “up to 70pc off”.

The site received more than 40,000 visits and 1,000 orders in the first hour into the sale, its CEO Shayaan Tahir told technology news website TechJuice. The average cart size on Homeshopping was a whopping Rs18,000, it said.

Published in Dawn, November 30th, 2016