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bne April 2021 Companies & Markets I 23
The most popular items are books, clothing, music (mostly vinyl records) and comics, says Nicetin.
The company faces competition from popular local websites like “classifieds Halo oglasi and Kupujem prodajem, big consumer electronics retailers who went online like Tehnomedia, Gigatron, and of course global marketplace Amazon”.
Looking ahead, “We are working on Limundo mobile app improvement and we started building a new website which we hope will suit our members even more. The new website will have some new features,” he adds.
Nicetin says the site initially saw a drop in sales when
the pandemic struck and Serbia was put under lockdown as people started panic buying food rather than other products. However, sales revived after a couple of months, and Limundo has since seen growth compared to the pre- pandemic year.
SERBIA: KupujemProdajem.com
Kupujem prodajem is one of the longest established e-commerce portals in the region. By the time it celebrated the 10th anniversary of its launch in October 2017, it had listed over 50mn classified ads, had more than 1mn registered users and 12bn page views. In its first 10 years of operation
it sold 4.75mn items with a total value of €630mn, including 710,000 mobile phones, 570,000 computers, 205,000
musical instruments, 35,000 cars, 21,000 tractors and
7,000 properties.
Founder and director Bojan Lekovic said at the time that Kupujem prodajem would continue, together with its users, to “build an online infrastructure for trade in our country”.
Lekovic, a one-time electrical engineer from Nis who is now based in the Netherlands, started Kupujem prodajem as a hobby alongside his brother. He later published his memoir "Bears on the road”, in which he talked frankly about his experiences in starting and running a business in Serbia.
ALBANIA: Ebuy.al
When ebuy.al launched back in 2013, online retail was almost non-existent in the country. The aim of its founders, who already ran the ikub.al portal, was to create an Amazon of Albania with everything in one place.
With no competitors on the market, ebuy.al quickly exceeded expectations. “It has been a challenge and a difficult path, of course, because the Albanian market is not so easy to reach, but to our surprise, it exceeded expectations in the first
year. Ebuy.al quickly became the main destination for online shopping for Albanians,” said ebuy.al business development manager Iralda Mitro in a 2019 interview with Business Magazine Albania.
Clothing, especially for women, is the most popular category on the site, but Mitro also listed Albanian national team t-shirts, jewellery, selfie sticks and mobile phone accessories as some of the best-selling products.
Commenting on the name of the site – which bears an uncanny resemblance to international e-commerce site eBay – Mitro said it was a shortened form of "electronic buy”, but admitted to Business Magazine Albania that the resemblance to eBay was “somewhat problematic”.
KOSOVO: Gjirafamall.com
Gjirafamall.com is the biggest e-commerce company in Kosovo offering a various products and services from food and clothing to health services, electronics and car accessories.
In February 2021 Gjirafamall.com launched a ‘Shija e Kosovës Online’ (A Taste of Kosovo Online) online sale platform to facilitate a new sales channel and promote some 30 local businesses offering finalised food products. The platform is
a result of collaboration between GjirafaMall and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation project: Promoting Private Sector Employment.
Gjirafa runs a variety of offline to online internet consumer services in the Balkans region and Albanian Diaspora. It is an Albanian search engine and a news aggregator for a market of 12mn people who speak the Albanian language worldwide.
It claimed to be the fastest growing internet services company
“When ebuy.al launched back in 2013, online retail was almost non-existent in Albania”
in the Balkans. In November 2020 Gjirafa was ranked 11th on Deloitte Technology Fast 50 growing Central Europe tech companies and first in the Balkans, with over 1,500% growth in the last four years.
“What makes this recognition even more important is that this is the first time a company from Kosovo [has been] ranked in the list,” Mergim Cahani, a founder and Gjirafa CEO said at the time.
MONTENEGRO: Patuljak.me
Southeast Europe’s smallest country with a population of just over 622,000, Montenegro doesn’t have the scale to grow a domestic e-commerce industry. However, online classifieds site patuljak.me has emerged as the largest platform in Montenegro for the sale, purchase, rental and exchange of goods and real estate.
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