Hedeya Stores

Hedeya Stores; this 13 year-old business is worth a decent review. It has opened a new market of elite toy stores in Cairo. Their team was the first to introduce the concept of gift registries in Egypt, although they haven’t really developed this feature much along the way. Today, I am only reviewing their mobile app. I assume that the biggest percentage of the company’s sales don't come from the app, because they have other very strong channels; basically the physical stores and the website (that appears to be a bit more updated than the app). But why am I reviewing the mobile app in specific? Because I think it is the easiest way to reach out to their main customer base (moms, apparently) through their mobile phones.

Four things I like:

    1. Categorization

If you are an expecting parent, or you are a friend of an expecting parent who is willing to buy them a gift, the detailed categories in the app will definitely help you know what you need for each and every stage.

    2. Variety

Tens of thousands of products are there on the app, and this is definitely a strength point. If you just dream of something for your child, you have big chances of finding it on Hedeya’s app.

    3. Product description

For each and every product, you will find a detailed description of what this product is, its brand, and its appropriate age group. I find this extremely useful myself.

    4. Filters

The importance of good filtering functionality is critical in an e-commerce app with tens of thousands of products no doubt. In Hedeya’s app, you can filter displayed products by brand, gender, age, price and sometimes by character and color. This helps narrow down your choices and reduce the time spent on searching for something specific.

Six things I dislike:

    1. Displaying sold out products

Not only do sold out products appear with hundreds of other listed products in each and every category, but you don't get to know that this product is out of stock except after you click on it to open the page displaying its details. I find this very confusing, especially that I found lots of out of stock products while checking the app few times.

    2. Unorganized Gift Registries

When I pressed on the Gift Registry icon, I thought something was wrong. They all seem to be dimmed (in pale pink), plus there are too many of them (I couldn't reach the end of the list) while there is no logical way of sorting/organizing them. The only thing I can see useful in this page is the search bar to be honest. 

    3. Confusing "Adding to Favorites" button

For some reason the "Add to Favorites" is in pink (the app's main color), and it doesn't change in any way after you press on it to add a product to favorites. This should be very basic.

    4. Crowded home page design

Something is wrong with the home page design, either the proportions of the different sections (being very close to each other in size), or the colors, or the sections themselves being not very catchy (content wise). In addition to that, I don't see a point in adding a main menu including shopping categories, gift registries, branches, and hotline while all these sections are reachable through other buttons in the app (that make more sense).

    5. Vibrating "Add to Cart" button

Ouch! The app is warning me! Am I buying too much, mama? This is what I felt when I pressed the "Add to Shopping Cart" button and got this vibration effect instead of a "product successfully added" notification message.

    6. Error messages!

I didn't get to see all error messages in the app, but I saw a couple and they clearly needed reviewing, either in terms of clarity or language, especially that this app supposedly addresses elite customers.

Overall, I'd give Hedeya Stores app a 6 out of 10 score. I would still use it but I wouldn't feel very comfortable using it.

View Hedeya Stores website on "https://www.hedeya.com/" or download their mobile app through the following links:

    - For App Store, where the app has a rating of 4.8 out of 5 from 8 users, click here. 

    - For Google Play, where the app has a rating of 3.3 out of 5 from 147 users, click here.

Happy eid! Talk to you next 7adouta! :)

                                                                                                                    End of May, 2020