A Chat with Tarek Sakr, CEO at Kuwait’s Largest Online Classifieds Platform: 4Sale

4Sale is Kuwait’s largest online classifieds platform and market leader in the sector. Our platform enables people to advertise, and buy, a huge range of goods and services online with ease.

4Sale is hugely popular with consumers in Kuwait. Over the last eight years, 2 million registered users have listed over 12 million goods and services on our platform. Each day the number of products and services listed on our platform grows. Currently, over 4,000 new products and services are listed daily.

Our core business model is a flat fee for individual listings in specific categories with a wide sector coverage, including property, automotive, services and electronics. Most recently, because of customer demand, we introduced a managed listing model in property under our 4Sale Realty umbrella. Users pay a fee and 4Sale’s Real Estate experts create an exclusive 3D tour of their property, upload and manage their listing, and screen potential buyers or renters.

Our focus is on customer experience. We use tech-enabled insights to generate personalised products for our users – meaning each user’s experience is tailored and fit for purpose.
 
 

 

What do you think makes this company unique?

 
We are deliberately focused on Kuwait only, for the time being. Our deep understanding of our market makes us unique. 4Sale is a solution carefully crafted for consumers in Kuwait and appeals to the trading culture of users living in the country.

In our business, first mover advantage is a very big thing. Once you attain critical mass in a market – as we have in Kuwait – and most of the population is using your platform, it is very hard for a second player to come in and disrupt this, even if they do it for free.

We are also very focused on profitability – particularly when compared with other start-ups in the MENA region. We are a profitable company and have been since inception. Because of this, we are able to re-invest our profits into nurturing our platform and optimising our customers’ experiences.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
In recent years, we have seen a huge shift in customer preference. Largely driven by the pandemic, customers are now much more comfortable sourcing goods and services online. In tandem, and as digitisation has increased, we have continued to invest in technology to optimise user experience and expand in each vertical.

Because of this, the sectors we operate in have expanded. This, and our first mover advantage, has helped us maintain our market-leading position. We have expanded the products and services we offer and are now more of an ‘everything company.’

During the pandemic, we also saw many brick-and-mortar businesses transition to online platforms, particularly 4Sale. We were proud to be able to offer new solutions to businesses that had never had a digital presence before and enable them to continue to operate even under the harshest of conditions.
 

What can we hope to see from 4Sale in the future?

 
We’re super passionate about the classifieds space, and we’re on a mission to be the leading online marketplace in the region.

We want to integrate new business verticals. In that sense, the sky is the limit for us. We have exciting plans for vertical expansion that we’ll share very soon.

As a highly trusted brand that is integrated into users’ everyday behaviour, we also want to get closer to transactions and offer more value-add services during those transactions. By doing this, we can take more of a fee from the transactions taking place on our platform.

The combined effects of more verticals, getting closer to transactions, and providing more value add – will take 4Sale to another level. Currently, we have 1 million active users across our site and app. In two to three years, we hope to be very close to 2 million active users for a country of less than 5 million.

We will achieve this by continuing to provide our customers with a reliable and value-add service that simplifies their lives.