I also found it especially interesting how much interaction the religious leaders have on Instagram for the size of Kuwait. For example, http://instagram.com/mishari_alafasy is the grand Imam of Kuwait. 15K likes for his following size is very impressive when compared to other Instagrammers with similar following sizes.

PS. He shared his profile from my app on his Instagram profile and our app immediately shot up to the top 10 apps in the Kuwait app store, and number 2 in photo and video. Users thanked him, and thanked Allah that he had shown them this new app.

FYI, Mishary Al Afasy isn't popular just in Kuwait, he's popular through out the entire Middle East.

This is not exclusive to Kuwait. I've seen several of these kinds of storefronts all over South East Asia. People use an app like "Line" to order stuff and communicate payment options . It's really interesting to see how people use social networking in unintended ways.

Most of the stuff that is sold is relatively cheap (< 15$), but trust is still a big problem. In my time there, I always wondered if it would be worthwhile for Facebook to facilitate this by for instance handling the payments, but I don't even know if they knew about this kind of stuff happening.

Can you give an example of a country in SE Asia where that sort of commerce is common? I'd have thought that people would opt to use one of the e-commerce platforms, since they provide payment and anti-fraud solutions.

Indonesia (and probably Malaysia).

Anti-fraud for e-Commerce is a long way to go. Most people still transfer money via bank using SMS (and they take screenshot of their cellphone for proofs to the seller).

Twitter, Instagram, Line, BBM, WhatsApp, and Facebook are being used for eCommerce.

Most of their customers won't mind if they were "tagged" (in Facebook) by sellers while westerners would complain like there's no tomorrow (and unfriended their friends if the sellers were their friends).

I'm just in awe to see how SE Asia countries are using social media.

As an Indonesian, I can concur.

PayPal, etsy, and eBay is like a disease over there. No one wants to deal with third party eCommerce platform. I don't know whether it is because of the cost or other things.

What I know is you can not scale verification of bank transfers once it reaches a certain number.

It's exactly for this kind of use-case that we built Bondsy, an app that lets you trade with friends. Doesn't have to be for money.

Check it out, it's free.

http://www.bondsy.com

Why the downvotes? It's not as if this is spam nor unrelated to the article. I think it's quite relevant actually. tagabek just asked why no one has built what we are building.

You didn't explain the relevance. "Trade with friends" doesn't clarify.

I was hoping that "exactly for this kind of use-case" would explain the relevance.

Bondsy is a mobile app that lets you post beautiful pictures with captions like Instagram. Except that Bondsy is designed specifically for trading and selling stuff, and that lets us help out sellers a lot more than Instagram.

I still have no idea what it does.

Me either. Something about trading instagram stuff?

You didn't contribute in any way to the discussion. Just posting on a thread that's tangentially related to your product isn't engaging in discussion (which is the point of the discussion thread), it's posting an ad.

Thanks for the feedback. I posted the link to Bondsy not to advertise but because I wanted to contribute a solution for the problem that Instagram is just not designed for trading things. Of course I'd be happy to talk about the space but I didn't find any questions here to discuss yet.

This story was totally not what I expected regarding Instagram accounts.

In my Americentric preconceived assumption I thought it would be about selling Instagram accounts, not using them as storefronts.

That's kind of cool, considering instagram is free, that makes you a free online store with a very simple process to work with.

Compare that to something like shopify, it's a much simpler product, maybe an e-commerce idea can be taken from this..

Kuwait is a tiny country. It's cheaper and quicker to just drive everywhere and pickup your order than wait for delivery.

Actually, we get everything delivered pretty quick...another plus side of being a tiny country. Also, its really damn hot...

I think poshmark is something similar that works well for clothing http://poshmark.com

yeah that's exactly in line with what I was thinking. Everything is done in this world :P

s/Instgram/social networks/

I have seen such ad-hoc marketplaces for the middle east and south asia on other social networks being used to sell anything form used furniture, imported goods, or as boutique store fronts. There are even intercity ride share groups.

I am curious as to why no one has built a web/mobile app to make this easier for the sellers.

My read on this is that the software doesn't matter very much, it's the network. Everyone's on instagram, and so you may as well sell on it. My guess (correct me if I'm wrong) is that Kuwait is very cash based for this stuff, and so things like credit card processing don't matter. If that's the case a picture stream is a pretty good approximation of a store's 'inventory,' and the slight benefit of making this software fit the needs of the seller better would be far outweighed by the fact that they would lose the buyer network.

> Kuwait is very cash based for this stuff

also, there is no personal income tax or vat, so they can legally post whatever at any time and any quantity and put 100% of cash straight into the pocket - no need to formalize those transactions, no IRS hunting your instagramic wealth.

These are some very enlightening points.

One of the things that I love most about software is how it might end up being used completely different than originally intended. When Kevin Systrom and his team started building Instagram, I bet that they didn't intend to provide a makeshift online marketplace for the people of Kuwait.

We have!! It's called Bondsy and it's totally free.

I posted about it here a few minutes ago but I got downvoted badly. No idea why.

I actually did. It's called fashion.gram (fashiongram.de) and it allows users to easily shop popular fashion content from IG.

Free classified ads. Wonder if this isn't monetizable. Paid "Ads" for higher visibility of your sheep for sale?