ba2olak: A Delivery Marketplace for Egypt's Underserved Areas

The Challenge

Grocery and market delivery in Egypt is concentrated in dense urban areas — established delivery apps rarely reach smaller towns and remote neighbourhoods, so residents there still walk between several stores, queue, and carry everything home themselves.

Delivery apps skip smaller towns and remote neighbourhoods
Residents walk between multiple stores and queue in person
No trusted way to order daily groceries by phone
Card-first apps leave cash-only customers behind

What We Built

A bilingual (Arabic-first) web + mobile marketplace where customers order from their phone and a ba2olak rider shops for the items in real stores and delivers to the door, cash on delivery. One Expo app serves both the customer and rider roles, backed by a crowd-sourced, AI-deduplicated bilingual catalog, WhatsApp OTP auth, and an admin dashboard for dispatch and catalog moderation.

Feature	Manual	Automated
Ordering	Walk store to store	Order by phone in ~2 minutes
Catalog	No shared product list	Crowd-sourced, AI-deduplicated & bilingual
Payment	Pay and carry in person	Cash on delivery to the door

Web + Mobile

Platforms shipped

Order status stages

Languages

ba2olak launched as a single Expo app serving both customers and riders — bringing phone-ordered, cash-on-delivery grocery runs to areas the big apps ignore.

Results