Publishing Corporate Ebooks With Payfort [Case Study]
Payfort is the leading online payment provider in the Middle East. With giant customers throughout diverse industries, you can say they have a pretty good overview of how things are trending with payments across the region. Luckily, they share this information publicly through their annual State of Payments report. With how things are advancing with interactive ebooks, this year Payfort decided to extend their reach by publishing interactive ebooks, in collaboration with Kotobee as their Digital Publishing Partner. We’ve had the opportunity to conduct this interview with Nardeen Abdalla, Marketing Director of Payfort, to learn more.
Tell us first a bit about your annual State of Payments report
State of Payments is our annual report. We usually publish it around the end of Q2 every year. This is our 3rd year. It started with a simple idea: give data, trends and useful information to companies to be able to grow their business. In the report we try to serve all company sizes starting from startups to enterprises. We target 7 countries (UAE, KSA, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, and Qatar) in both Arabic and English languages. The report is divided into four sections:
- The first section covers trends (includes market size per different categories), forecast for 2020, acceptance ratio, refund ratio, and seasonality (which show the trends and the behaviours for the increase and the decrease in online transactions).
- The second section covers demographics: population, Internet users, online buyers, social media preference and income level for each country to understand the potential of each market and individual behaviour.
- The third section surveys consumers in long infographic format. We made a survey with different countries going through the online purchasing journey to help businesses understand the consumer mind and serve them the right way.
- The fourth section covers challenges: like any other new industry we face a lot of challenges. Some of them are solved and others not yet. We also conducted interviews with market expert to get their insights. We added a subsection called Ecommerce Utopia showing the best environments for online businesses to be.
In the report, we also include a special section explaining the methodology behind each of the four sections above.
How useful was the idea of infographics to portray your statistics?
From the feedback we have been getting for the past 3 years, our visuals are one of our primary strengths. Such reports usually include a lot of numbers and statistical information that are not presented in an easy way, causing people to shy away from. This is why the way we present the report is extremely important to us.
What brought the idea of turning the report into an eBook?
Each year we try to enhance our experience and the reach. We started with a PDF 3 years ago. The 2nd year we did an interactive website. This year we added a mobile responsive version to be easier to view from your phone. Plus we created mobile apps. In our targeted countries, smart phones and handheld devices is a must channel to explore.
Which platforms did you publish your ebooks to?
We published native apps to iOS (iPad and iPhone) and Android, in both Arabic and English. We also published to Amazon Kindle and Apple Books.
How was the feedback from your readers?
The feedback is very positive and we do get a lot of questions, which is great! That means people are reading and interested to know more.
Any thoughts or plans so far on how you can improve your next ebook?
Yes. Our next ebooks will be more optimized for mobile (in terms of content) and also include more interactive elements.
How was your overall experience with Kotobee?
The Kotobee team was amazing. They did the apps in no time, not to mention their flexibility and efficiency with all our last minute requests.
Read more.
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