Amazon owned Souq.com will be opening the Amazon Global Store on the Middle Eastern ecommerce site. That will mean that more than a million items that are available on the Seattle based ecommerce giant’s marketplace will be available to shoppers in Saudi Arabia.
We are excited about making over 1 million popular products from Amazon available on Souq.com to customers. This brings global selection closer to our customers in the region, and we will continue to grow this further. We share the same vision as Amazon and focus on providing our customers with best-in-class selection, great prices and a convenient shopping experience.
– Saleem Hammad, general manager of KSA, Souq
The Amazon Global Store enables international shoppers to browse and purchase items from retailers, and Amazon themselves, that are willing to ship to the country that the buyers reside in. Payment is made in the shopper’s local currency and Amazon takes care of some of the heavy lifting to ensure that the transaction is as seamless as possible. As an example, it is also the predominant way in which Australian shoppers can buy from overseas sellers because the GST complicates the transaction.
Amazon completed the purchase of the Souq.com marketplace in July 2017. They paid $580 million in cash for the Dubai-based online retailer, according to an SEC filing. Sometimes called the Amazon of the Middle East, Souq.com was founded in 2005 and remains the most popular online shopping site in the region.
Amazon is making very significant investments in international sites at the moment and also ensuring that the Amazon choice of inventory, where possible, is also being made available to shoppers. Moves like this dramatically increase Amazon’s reach and, sometimes, also mean that Amazon merchants can sell effectively to countries that they might not otherwise be willing to export to because of trading difficulties associated with exporting. The Middle East, in particular, does represent a daunting prospect to many.
