News / Iran Today

Rapid growth of online shopping in Iran

Friday, 16 September 2016 3:10 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 16 September 2016 3:10 PM ]

Iran online shopping

Following a rapid growth of internet use in Iran, people started to trust online shops, slowly though, inasmuch as nearly 95% of orders in the country are online.

Facts and figures say there are more than 20,000 e-shops running in Iran's Tehran today. Only in 2015, the value of their business activities crossed $17.4 billion dollars. The figure is registered at a time when most of the population is yet to be lured into buying things online. Estimates show that online shopping from Iranian e-shops rises by an average of 60 percent per year.

The internet has started growing in Iran at a high speed over the past few years. Statistics for the past 10 months are indicative of the fact that the penetration rate of the internet in Iran is 82.12%. The percentage is even more than 100% in some cities. Iran has newly set up the first phase of the national information network which results in drastic increase in the speed. At least 19 million people use internet on their mobiles. Citizens in 600 cities have access to 3G and 200 cities have access to 4G internet. The rate of mobile phone penetration in Iran is 94.46%.

This degree of internet penetration sets the ground for development of e-trade. Ordering a product online in Iran is not different from other developed countries. Creating the culture of trust and e-shopping among the Iranians was never a simple task, and the online shops such as Digi-kala, Bamilo, and Zan-bil have been the main hubs of such activities. Online shops have a close cooperation with Iran's National Post Company. Iran’s national post company strives to bring itself up to speed using the latest technologies. One of these technologies is the tracking services of postal consignments.

With the “track consignments” service, both the sender and receiver can track the consignments she or he has sent and keep up-to-date with the latest processing status simply by visiting the website of Iran’s national post company. It is years now that Iranian banks have developed the required infrastructure for online payments despite the sanctions. When it comes to online shopping, cyber police plays a key factor to curb criminal activities. The police deal with crimes like fraud, libeling people, hacking and intrusion to servers. In effect, the police have defined 80 cybercrimes to consider.

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