A ranked audit of your store, your checkout and your acquisition, for retailers already trading in Jordan and the Gulf. You get the three fixes worth doing and the order to do them in.
From the team that scaled a GCC marketplace to one million orders, 72% of them on a phone.
Most of these engagements end with us recommending you keep the platform you have.
The 5× is Waqtee, achieved through SEO and UX rather than paid spend — see section 10. The two-week figure is our own commitment rather than a measured average.
Probably more than once, by people paid to reach different conclusions.
An audit whose recommendations happened to be exactly the services on their rate card. Not dishonest — just a conclusion reached by someone who could only be paid for one of the answers.
Ninety slides, four hundred issues, no order of operations. Everything was a finding, nothing was a decision, and the document is still in a folder.
The store was slow, so it was rebuilt. It is now fast and the revenue is the same, because speed was never the reason people were not buying.
The common failure is not bad analysis. It is analysis that never had to survive contact with a number.
Nobody hires a consultant because the store is ugly. They call when the two lines that used to move together stopped.
Cost per acquisition creeps up quarter after quarter. The channel is not getting worse — the store is converting less of what it already pays for.
Search is the highest-intent action on the site and usually the least examined. When it returns nothing for a product you stock, that is a sale you paid for and lost at the last step.
Around 72% of orders in this region are placed on a phone. If the desktop conversion rate is the one on the dashboard, the report is about a quarter of the customers.
A replatform is the most expensive answer available and it is the default one, because it is the only answer an agency can quote for confidently.
Media spend against a checkout that loses a third of the people who reach it is a subsidy to the ad platform, renewed monthly.
Four changes, one of which is worth more than the other three together. Doing them alphabetically costs a quarter of the year.
Conversion rates, cart abandonment and returns behave differently here, and an audit that compares you against Western averages will find problems you do not have while missing the ones you do.
Around 70% of consumers across the region prefer to pay the driver, and refusal at the door is a normal cost of that. Benchmarking your returns against a prepaid Western store will make a healthy business look broken.
Shoppers type in Arabic, in dialect, with inconsistent spelling. A search index built for English returns nothing, and the customer concludes you do not stock it. It is the cheapest large win on most stores we look at.
72% of orders here are placed on a phone. We audit the small screen first and treat desktop as the secondary case, which is the reverse of how most reports are written.
A flat national promise is either a lie in the places it cannot be met or a margin giveaway in the places it can. Where the promise is wrong, the abandonment shows up at the last step.
The fair objection to taking advice from a firm that also sells the fix. Here is our answer, in writing.
I was genuinely impressed by the results, to the extent that I decided to hire them again to revamp and upgrade my website. Once again, the Umbrella500 team exceeded expectations.
Baha AbdeenCEO, WaqteeWhy this answers the question. The first Waqtee engagement grew revenue five-fold without a rebuild. The rebuild came later, when the business had genuinely outgrown the store — in that order, and years apart.
The most expensive sentence in e-commerce is "we should probably replatform".
Two different problems that arrive at the same question. They are priced and scoped separately, and the call decides which one you are actually in.
You suspect the platform is the problem and are not sure.
A platform assessment against your actual numbers: what your catalogue, order volume and money model require, what your current stack can and cannot do, and what a move would cost across five years including the parts nobody quotes. Ends with a recommendation that is frequently "stay".
You get: a written assessment, a five-year cost model with your figures in it, and a decision you can take to a board.
The store works and the revenue has stopped moving.
A ranked audit of the trading experience — search, category structure, product pages, checkout, delivery promise and the mobile path through all of them — ordered by what each fix is worth. This is where the Waqtee five-fold came from, and none of it was a rebuild.
You get: findings ranked by revenue impact, an order of operations, and the option of us executing or not.
If you are pre-launch with no store at all, neither of these is what you need — that is the e-commerce development page, and it will tell you when to use Shopify instead of us.
Every finding gets an estimated lift and an effort cost. Ranking by lift alone is how audits produce ninety slides nobody acts on. Move the sliders and watch the order change.
Estimated annual value at the figures you chose. On a real engagement these come from your analytics rather than a slider — the point is the ordering rather than the arithmetic.
Illustrative. Ranges are deliberately conservative and no engagement is sold on these numbers.
There is no analyst. Between them they have taken more than a thousand MENA businesses online and run the commercial side of stores at every size on this page.
Twenty years as a consultant and e-commerce specialist. Co-founder and COO of ShopGo, where she helped more than 1,000 MENA businesses scale online — many past $100K a month. She has seen every way a store underperforms in this region.
Co-founder of ShopGo.me, acquired. He has since supported over 13,000 entrepreneurs across the region and leads the commercial side of every engagement, including the growth work that took Goldenscent past a million orders.
A branded watch retailer in Jordan selling into the Gulf. We were brought in to grow what already existed. Revenue grew five-fold through search visibility and the trading experience — no replatform, no new stack, no rebuild. The rebuild came years later, when the business had genuinely outgrown the store.
From Umbrella500_Canonical_Numbers.md. Waqtee: partner since 2022, outcome-priced engagement. Goldenscent: growth partner since 2021. Both figures are the clients' own outcomes.
Thirty minutes on what you sell, where you sell it and what stopped moving. We decide together which track you are in, and sometimes that neither applies.
Analytics, search logs, order data and the checkout funnel. We look at the mobile path first because that is where the customers are.
We buy from you. Repeatedly, on a phone, in Arabic and English, paying by card and by cash on delivery, and we return something. Most findings come from this rather than from the dashboard.
Findings ordered by what each is worth against your revenue, with effort attached. Delivered as a document and walked through live so you can argue with it.
Take it to your own team, to another agency, or to us. The engagement is complete either way and is not credited against a build.
Priced per engagement against your revenue and the size of the catalogue, and quoted on the call rather than published here — the work for a 200-product store and a 20,000-product store is not the same job. It is a fixed fee, not a day rate, and it is not credited against a build.
No, and the roadmap is written so you do not have to. It names what to change and in what order, in enough detail for your own developer or another agency to execute. If that is what happens, the engagement still did its job.
Then we will say so and show the five-year arithmetic that got us there, including the parts that do not favour us. It is the less common outcome. Most of these end with three changes to the store you already run.
Read access to analytics, the search logs and order data, plus a test account on the store. We do not need production admin and we would rather not have it.
Two things. We rank findings by what they are worth rather than listing them, so there is an order of operations. And we are paid the same whether the answer is "replatform" or "change three things", which is the part that changes what an audit concludes.
No. There is nothing to audit and no trading data to rank against. Start with the e-commerce development page, which will tell you when a hosted platform is the better answer.
Tell us what you sell and what stopped moving. Thirty minutes, no cost, and we will say so if there is nothing here worth paying us for.
Or write directly: saleem.najjar@umbrella500.com