Site: kuwait-restaurants.blogspot.com

Type: Food / Info

Language: English

Launch Date: August, 09

Brief: Kuwait Restaurants is a newly launched blog based directory for Kuwait restaurant phone numbers and addresses. It has just launched, so far has no photos, has a very ordinary design, and has a listing of 98 restaurants.

Since it turns out we don’t have any comprehensive listing that is constantly updating, it’s good to mark down any site with such listing for when you need it. I personally hate dialing central numbers to get restaurant number I need. I prefer to seek it online always.

Snapshots:

And by the way, you can search for their listing from Q8Ba7th Phones Search.

Tip: Q8Ba7th.com – The Search Site For Kuwait

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Name: Maachla.com

Following our initial review of Maachla.com, the guys at Maachla took the time to go through our opinion of the site and offer another chance for trying them out after the new enhancements, and after their award winning “Best Website in Kuwait” in Sheikh Salim Al-Ali Informatics Award.

Shopping Experience:

So we did give it a couple of tries. The first was for some item that was out of market for some time, and we found the item on Maachla.com and placed the order, interested to see the outcome. Shortly when the delivery time arrived, I got a call that I couldn’t attend to. Calling back their hotline, your number gets recorded and you hear a message telling you someone will call you shortly. Later on a real nice friendly guy called back and told me that specific item is out of stock, and offered an alternative if I was interested. I declined and thanked him for his call. This tells us a good thing about their customer service quality, and a bad thing about their inventory system. It’s not tied to the real Mishref Co-Op database.

The second time we ordered few regular items, including some beverages. The shortage in varieties, and availability of all size options in the beverages section did not make the experience as good as we hoped it would. Below we give quick brief about each part of the experience.

Registration:

Again, to try adding items to the basket you have to register. To register you have to give in your mobile number. How many people would wanna do that before they try out the site? Ask for these info at checkout only. Get users to try and love what you have worked hard for!

Delivery:

As explained earlier, you get to select the delivery hour up to two weeks in advance, but you cannot select the current hour for delivery. It has to be at least during the next coming hour, so even if it’s only 9:01 PM, you would have to select 10-11 PM delivery time sot. That’s the only bad part, and otherwise, their delivery is quite on time from my one time experience.

I would suggest however that in their schedule, unavailable time slots become non-selectable rather than reloading the page and coming back with a popup error message.

Inventory:

This was so disappointing for me, as it makes you unsure if what you place in your basket is available or not, which is really a bad experience. You have the option however per item to allow substitute product in case your preference is not available. Good to have, but I’m surprised this option is selected by default. Maachla should not assume I am ok with a substitute of their choice. I should be asked to approve it. So careful when you’re checking out. If you don’t want it, uncheck the allow substitute boxes.

At all rates, I believe effort should be put into tying Maachla inventory system live with Mishref Co-Op one for live item and pricing update.

Variety:

If they are operating from their own store, I would understand. But securing the deal with Mishref Co-Op should mean much larger variety of items, that is as close to shopping at Mishref Co-Op experience. In my case however, I had to browse between brands, select my second or third brand preference, because the item that’s available in Mishref Co-Op is not available in the online store. And I wish it ends there. Even when you find the brand you want, finding the size you want is another task. The squeezed item photo does not help identify it, and many sizes are missing. And with soft drinks, when you open a can, you either drink it now, or throw it away. You can’t store it for later. However even trivial items like PEPSI did not have all the common sizes, I had to go with another one, and I couldn’t even get a box set, I had to order individual cans. 7-Up was not available at all for some reason as well.

How It Should Be?

I think it would be best if a single item like PEPSI would open a PEPSI page, and I get to select per unit or box, and the size I want. All available sizes should be there logically.

Customer Service:

Customer service quality was really high, you would feel comfortable speaking to the guy over the phone and feel he’s happy to help. The idea of registering your number once you call the hotline for them to get back, while neat, is a bit inconvenient for me the customer however. When I call, I might want to talk to the guy now as I will be busy in 5 minutes or so, and this is exactly what happened to me. I called, they saved my number. I had to finish some work and be away from the phone when they called back. I call again, have to wait for their call, only to get an international call by the time they’re calling me back.

My guess is this method saves them the cost of having customer service people on the standby 24/7 when they don’t have that heavy load. This way they can arrange for the call at their own time, but it comes at a cost I guess.

Pricing

This is where is struck me hard. At checkout, you get to see this confusing message.

I most certainly do not believe this term is there for Maachla to abuse, but it shows a kind of uncertainty in their item pricing and lack of price update. But for me the customer, how can I trust such a system? If I sense a difference in the bill, I have to manually compare each and every item. This is also related to the lack of an inventory system.

e-List:

The e-List is a quick way for you to write down items you want, quantity, size, and brand. You can leave the size and brand open, go to checkout quickly, and they would try to match your preference.

Conclusion:

We believe Maachla.com has got all the hard elements of the equation in place. The store, the physical items, the delivery capacity. What they need is just to tie it stronger together. Have an updated inventory system, even if it’s a nightly update only, that would still be much better than the current situation. Give people the same physical experience by providing what’s already there. Faster and more AJAXed experience is always better as well.

If the problem of varieties is at least solved, and a guarantee of price range, I guess I could rely on this service for at least pre-packaged products. Fruits and vegetables are a different matter I say for now.

Tip: Q8Ba7th.com – The Search Site For Kuwait

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Name: Maachla.com

Business Type: Grocery Shopping

Languages: English/Arabic

Launch Date: November, 2008

Brief: Maachla (which means in Arabic grocery items for house) is another online grocery shopping site in Kuwait, like Taw9eel.com, but unlike Taw9eel which operates its own storage area, this one seems to be coordinating with Mishref Co-op.

Review: Being a follower, one would think it has a tough competition to make with Taw9eel, which usually guarantees 1 hour delivery at all times, operating from their own stores according to what they say, rather than dealing with Mishref or any other Co-Op. This gives Taw9eel the lead in delivery time, and better control over the stock items. But it also makes them more limited with item variety, as they can’t keep large stocks of items that wont sell, and also at large extra savings cost. Maachla on the other hand comes up with much greater varieties with lower overhead cost. For example, Taw9eel has only 3 ketchup items of same brand, Heinz, while Maachla comes with over 10 items of different brands.

Price: This is where the credibility of Maachla have failed me. While item prices in general appear to be a lot cheaper than Taw9eel, 300 compared to 500 fils, the prices seem inaccurate and varying for the same product. For example, the below are two Heinz Mayonnaise of different sizes, with the smaller one 300 Fils more expensive.

This is most likely a data entry problem only. The other problem I noticed was price difference between search result page, and product details page:

Search Result Price of 340g is 300 Fils

Product Details page of Heinz ketchup 340g showing price is 450 Fils

So which one is it? This shows hidden bugs in the system and not data entry errors, and for me would keep me away from trying it out in the meantime.

Usability & Interface: Usability I believe is another weakness of the site. Grocery shopping is unlike other type of shoppings. Needs to be fast and easy to search, navigate, and go back and forth. Browsing the site content on Maachla however is rather difficult, as opposed to the AJAX rich interface of Taw9eel with the following shortcomings as I see it:

• Main page of the site is almost free of of any item listing, when it should be the kick off point for it.
• Clicking on category does not bring that category products, but rather requires another click on the subcategory.
• Side menu is taking large part of the screen, when you need to focus on the products them selves most of the time.
• Search function does not seem to be working.
• Registration is required to add items to the cart, when some stores compete to provide checkout without even registration. Registration upon checkout can be enforced, but not before I even try adding items to the cart. Especially when registration requires all my personal information, mobile number, and home address. A side note also is why does the site use the mobile number as the user name? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me
• Thumbnails: The squeezed thumbnails of items really distorts the look of it, makes item less appealing, and misleading as well. There is the gram size ofcourse, but still the look of a pepsi can is much easier than comparing the gram size.

A revisit for the site design and usability I believe is in order.

Express Shop: This could be their answer to the usability of the site. Express Shop is a quick way to write the items you’re looking for, just as in the notes you carry with you along to the grocery store, and search. You will get list of all available items matching yours. That is a neat feature in my opinion, though still does not overcome all the shortcomings.

Delivery and Charge: We were not able to find any information about delivery charges, but the minimum order amount is 2.0 KD, which is pretty fair. They do not specify the areas of delivery however.

Company Info Missing: As an online grocery store, I guess many people would like some information about the company behind this service, and the way they operate. However we did not see any information like this, not an FAQ section or details about refunds and payments either. The only lead is that it’s “Designed by: Mag Web Technologies Pvt Ltd”, and dealing with Mishref co-op.

Enforce of SSL on all pages: For some reason, all site pages are enforced over SSL connection, which ofcourse means all pages are encrypted and take much longer to load. Not even Amazon takes that step. Encrypted pages are checkout and confidential information pages usually.

Conclusion: Overall, I think the market is big enough for new comers, as majority are still not depending on the high quality, yet very expensive service of Taw9eel.com. With little work on the site, and good market reach, I guess this thing could become handy for many.

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UPDATE: Site has been taken down and domain is parked now.

Q8-Health.com is a new Kuwait medical directory, and while it does not implement the latest technologies, it does provide through a very simple site design the required information. The site lists information for the following:

• Public and private clinics and hospitals: The private hospital list was short and could use a bit of update
• Private Doctors and Specialist numbers, categorized by major. This is helpful I no longer need to dig into the newspaper
• Gym clubs: As part of the body health
• Pharmacies: Would be good (though difficult to implement) to list working hours and shifts of those pharmacies. Also, if it can go down to specify the area, as it’s tedious to call one by one to question their location.
• Dental Clinics: WOW… See how long the list goes. Dental must be profitable business
• Regular and blood specific Diet programs: Better presentation of the information could be made here, and a reference to the source of those information would give more credibility.

The site is not so wide and big, but the information could come in handy when you need it. Hope to see it being updated regularly.

UPDATE: A friend of mine drew my attention to the fact there may be mistakes in the contact list. For example, he noted Dr. Iyad and Asfor are for Bateniya and not Sukari. He may have an old phonebook information unfortunately. So take care when using the site if you want to.

Tip: Q8Ba7th.com – The Search Site For Kuwait

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I have to say first, I used to make jokes about starting Banak online business, but I never saw this coming. Popup-kw is an online site for ordering different tastes of popcorns. Popcorn White Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate, or mixed flavors for prices ranging from 2 to 3 KDs. While the site might not look so attractive, and one could think it’s fake, Some Contrast blogger was offered a FREE sample of the popcorn and he wrote up a review about it. As he says, the popcorn tasted great, and the packaging looks really nice (photos in the link). Not sure if this was a special package or it’s the standard you get.

One thing to note is, while their business is online based, the site does not have online ordering, and I don’t think it’s an officially registered company. I think it’s something similar to personal efforts, just like how some people make special beautiful stuff and sell it to their friends, but this one is online driven. You can place your order with them by phone, or SMS, and you pay on delivery, so there is nothing to be afraid of. Some information I see missing from the site is the delivery details. How fast do they deliver? Which areas? How do I guarantee it will arrive hot and fresh before the movie starts (or the match, as we are in African Cup nowadays)? and the delivery times ofcourse. Those information would be helpful if made available online.

The idea might seem weird again, but if you are setting infront of TV waiting for tonight’s movie, I’m just thinking 2 KD for tasty popcorn might be a good deal. Just don’t come ringing the bell during the movie .

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