Noon has quietly killed its free shipping service with no minimum purchase requirement in the United Arab Emirates. The ecommerce company had introduced the service without any fanfare in June last year, a week after Amazon launched its premium membership (subscription) service Amazon Prime in the UAE.
The company obviously did not share any details about why they killed the service but have recently updated the details in their FAQs section, indicating that they provide free shipping on all orders over AED 100 in the UAE, which is what the company used to do before launching free shipping for everything.
Even when the service had launched, we questioned the long-term sustainability of the service, with our June 2019 story noting, “We don’t understand how Noon could sustain this or stop people from abusing the service but with all the money they have in the bank, they probably don’t care about the economics right now and are only concerned about beating the competition.”
The company as we had previously pointed out was apparently trying to counter Amazon Prime esp. their free next day delivery with no minimum order requirement.
But Amazon Prime sells as a bundled subscription with a monthly price of AED 16 ($4.4) so the next day free delivery option (with no minimum purchase requirement) is only available for their subscribers whereas Noon rolled it out for all their customers in the UAE.
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