The UK’s Top Online-Only Indies: Hitari

As our Indie Retail Month continues, we continue our look at the UK’s top online-only indies in the UK with Hitari.

MD Kamal Hitari tells MCV how Hitari has progressed to a stage where it has its own in-house marketing team.

Since starting up in 2010, Hitari has grown its product range and customer base in the process.

This year alone has seen the site vastly increase its product range and experience improved sales in the process.

It has been a fantastic year, better sales results, an increased product portfolio three times larger than at the start of the year and a number of new functionalities already added,” said Hitari MD Kamal Hitari.

Additions include an improved search facility, product image display box, incorporating reviews within the product listing, pages in a neat tabs, and also better social media work.

It is really an exciting year and we are currently investing a lot of effort into the website and have now formed a dedicated online marketing team in house.”

This marks a great improvement from when the company first started out three years ago.

The website started with no more than 40 to 50 products – now it offers more than 10,000 different products for sale and keeps growing on a daily basis,” added Hitari.

We started with a basic hosting service with basic user interface and are now powered by dedicated hosting servers with a custom made design.

We continue developing all the time by adding new functionalities and improve the user shopping experience.”
Hitari has found that support from Google has helped it through some of the main challenges inherent within in the online retail space.

Aggressive competition from other retailers, lack of support against frauds and online marking has also proved to be a real challenge, which we have now dedicated a lot of effort and resources towards in order to accelerate our growth this year,” added Hitari.

We have received some focused support by Google in regards to the latest changes with Google shopping and advertising which has already proven very beneficial.

There are plans for exciting new developments for Hitari and enhancements are in place ready to give the site a makeover before the end of this year.

We are planning to give the website a facelift this year, continue adding more products and extend the functionalities of the website by including multiple currencies, language translations and more importantly, a total re-organisation of the categories and sub- categories,” said Hitari.

Hitari already stocks a range of products outside of video games and this will continue to form a key part of the development of the site.

We currently offer a huge range of PC accessories, components, gamer clothing, audio, cutting-edge sound equipment and newly released gadgets. We are always looking to add more and more exciting new products and there are many categories that we are looking into at the moment.”

Stocking such an expansive range can make the design of a site feel cluttered but Hitari is attempting to address this issue in the redesign.

Hitari states: We will be introducing a departments level to make the site navigation the easiest possible. Other new cutting-edge functionalities will also be incorporated and we will be revealing details very soon.”