How 3,525 Saudi home businesses got online in under a year.
Over 4,100 families ran home-based businesses with no digital presence, no structured way to sell, and no path to scale beyond word of mouth. We built the curriculum and the onboarding pipeline that turned that into 3,525 working storefronts.
How do you digitise thousands of small businesses at once?
Not by teaching them one at a time.
The constraint in a programme like this is never enthusiasm — it is throughput. Four thousand families each need a store that works, and doing that sequentially takes years nobody has.
The answer is to treat store creation as a pipeline rather than a series of projects: a standardised onboarding workflow, a curriculum that front-loads the decisions every owner has to make, and a delivery team that can run both in parallel at volume.
What was the challenge?
Under the Masar 3500 initiative, in collaboration with MakanE, the Social Development Bank needed to take over 4,100 Saudi families running home-based businesses and equip each one to sell online — with the skills and a functioning store, not just a certificate.
Three constraints framed it. The families had no experience setting up online stores, weak digital marketing skills, and no reliable route to market.
How do you build 3,525 stores in ten months?
You automate the parts that repeat.
Three and a half thousand storefronts, each with a payment gateway connected and shipping configured, inside ten months. That arithmetic works only when the repeatable steps run without a person driving them. Store creation and daily store management were both automated.
What stayed human was the part that needed judgement: the training, the product decisions, the coaching an owner needs when her first order arrives. The pipeline absorbed the volume so the team could spend its hours where they changed an outcome.
That split is the transferable lesson. A programme designed around 4,100 families has to decide early which work scales by machine and which scales by hiring, because getting that wrong is what turns a ten-month delivery into a three-year one.
What did the programme consist of?
Two components ran in parallel for every productive family enrolled. Phase 2 of the initiative, delivered through 2023.
Thirteen sessions over nine weeks
Delivered per family. Each session split into three parts: trainer-led content, applied work on the family's own products, and an open Q&A.
A store, set up and launched
Store creation and launch on the Makani (مكاني) digital platform, with payment and shipping configured before handover.
Empowering individuals, freelancers and small enterprises by making e-commerce accessible to everyone.Programme vision — session one deck, translated
What did the thirteen sessions cover?
From the first decision an owner faces to the legal structure she trades under. Two sessions are worth stopping on, and they are marked.
- 01Getting the most from Masar 3500Programme overview, training objectives, guidance, session structure
- 02Opportunities in e-commerceFirst-time seller challenges, e-commerce in Saudi Arabia, business models, platforms, a success-story case study
- 03Building and launching your online storeChoosing a platform, creating an account, customising branding and design
- 04Getting the most from the Makani platformFeatures, promotional tools, product and customer management, Makani partners, the Makani Plus app
- 05Product design and developmentWhy design matters, the improvement process, making products attractive, prototyping, case studies
- 06Digital marketing techniquesFundamentals, channels, building paid campaigns, analysing performance and optimising
- 07Writing persuasive product contentEffective descriptions, unique selling points, search optimisation, and using AI tools to write product descriptions
- 08Product photography and presentationWhy photography matters, techniques and equipment, editing and retouching, presenting images in-store
- 09A successful sales strategySales channels, online retail, multi-vendor marketplaces, B2B and B2C, payment gateways
- 10Improving customer serviceThe SERVQUAL model, handling enquiries and feedback, communication channels, measuring satisfaction, building loyalty
- 11Operations, order management and shippingFulfilment, packaging, choosing a shipping company, delivery timing, cost calculation, handling returns
- 12Pricing and revenue strategyFinancial literacy, pricing, cost calculation, profit and loss, financial guidance
- 13The legal side of selling onlineLegal requirements, company types, registration, permits and licences, and Saudi freelance work documentation
In 2023 we taught home-based producers in Saudi Arabia to use AI for writing product descriptions.
Session seven put AI writing tools in front of women running businesses from their kitchens, at a point when that was still unusual practice in agencies, let alone in a government-funded training programme for micro-enterprises.
The last session moved informal home businesses into the formal economy.
Session thirteen covered Saudi freelance work documentation (وثيقة العمل الحر): who qualifies, how to register, and what it unlocks. A family that finished the programme could trade as a legally recognised operation, with priority access to government services and a bank account it could open simply. That outcome is measured in legal standing.
What did Umbrella500 deliver?
- A comprehensive e-commerce mastery curriculumCovering everything an owner needs to run a store independently.
- An onboarding workflow built for scaleA repeatable path from enrolment to a live, functional storefront.
- Project team supervision and coordinationAcross the full delivery period.
What did the programme leave behind?
A complete body of training IP, owned by the programme and reusable by whoever runs the next cohort. The version numbers are the interesting part: a trainer guide that reached v19 was rewritten nineteen times against real delivery.
Delivered with
What were the results?
Families in, storefronts out
The gap between a programme that trains and a programme that ships. Nearly nine in ten families finished holding a store that worked.
Who the programme reached
70 in every 100 trainees were women — the single figure that says most about who this programme was actually for.
The strongest thing this page is missing. A named quote from the Social Development Bank or MakanE would put the client's own voice behind 3,525 delivered stores.
To source from: Social Development Bank · MakanE — add to design/data/testimonials.json, then render from there
