In 2019, I sat in a café in the city of Khemisset with two men who were talking about a new project that would allow anyone to create an online store and start selling on the internet.
The first was my friend Mohamed El Ghaissani. We had previously worked together at the Moroccan news website Alyaoum24 and Soltana magazine, and a close friendship had connected us long before we began this new professional journey.
I was meeting the second man for the first time. He was already a well-known personality on social media. His name was Mohamed Baabit, although almost everyone knew him as Simo Life.
I had recently resigned from Hespress, where I had spent around eighteen months managing the video team. I knew that I wanted to change my career, but I did not yet know where I wanted to go.
In that café, El Ghaissani and Simo began explaining the project they were developing: a platform called YouCan.
They spoke about online stores, landing pages, orders, conversion rates, payments, shipping and user experience.
I listened and tried to connect the words, but I understood very little of what they were saying.
I came from journalism, video production and content creation. I had never sold a product online or managed an e-commerce store. I did not understand why one person would click an advertisement and buy immediately, while another would leave the page without doing anything.
Yet I was not being offered a small role in which I could learn quietly.
I was expected to lead almost everything unrelated to software development: customer support, social media, video and content, while also contributing to product management.
In other words, I was being asked to manage several parts of a world I barely understood.
I did not know then that this meeting was more than a job interview. It was my entry ticket into one of the most important periods in the history of e-commerce in Morocco.
E-commerce Already Existed, but Most Moroccans Could Not See It
E-commerce in Morocco did not begin with COVID.
Online stores already existed before the pandemic, and online sales and payments were growing. In 2019, merchant and service websites affiliated with Morocco’s Interbank Electronic Banking Centre recorded 9.8 million online payment transactions, an increase of 18.2% from the previous year.
Those figures covered online card payments, however, and did not represent the entire market, particularly the large number of transactions completed through cash on delivery.
The market was moving, but for a large part of Moroccan society, e-commerce still felt distant.
Many merchants assumed that selling online required a large company, a team of developers and a substantial budget. Many customers also hesitated to enter their bank card details on a website they did not recognise.
The model that began spreading rapidly was much simpler: an advertisement on Facebook or Instagram, a product page, a telephone number and payment when the order arrived.
This model suited the reality of the Moroccan market, but it created its own chain of problems: fake orders, incomplete addresses, customers changing their minds, the need to call every buyer to confirm an order, and delivery companies whose service quality varied from one city to another.
I gradually understood why YouCan was intended to be more than a tool for creating a website.
It was an attempt to build a platform around the reality of Moroccan, Arab and African merchants, rather than the assumptions of platforms created for markets where customers routinely pay by card before receiving their purchases.
We Entered 2020 Preparing to Launch a Platform, and Then the World Changed
On 14 January 2020, we launched YouCan publicly.
We expected people to register and test the platform, but we did not anticipate the numbers that arrived during the first few hours. The system filled with users trying to create their stores. Problems appeared that we had never encountered during testing, and the team eventually had to suspend registration temporarily.
I still remember something Mohamed El Ghaissani said that night:
“Where did all these people come from?”
It was a moment of excitement and fear.
We were delighted that people wanted to try what we had built. But every new user also brought the possibility of discovering another problem.
A platform that works well when used by the team that built it is not necessarily ready for thousands of people, each using it in a way its developers may never have anticipated.
We thought that surge of registrations would be the biggest event we would experience that year.
We had no idea that the entire world was only weeks away from stopping.
When the pandemic reached Morocco, shops closed and lockdown restrictions were introduced. Merchants suddenly faced a question that was no longer optional:
How can we reach customers when customers can no longer reach us?
Consumers were also forced to buy remotely items they would previously have insisted on seeing and touching before paying for them.
During the first nine months of 2020, online payments in Morocco increased by 24%, despite the decline in overall card activity caused by the crisis. The Interbank Electronic Banking Centre also reported growing interest among merchants in remote sales, online payments and card payments upon delivery.
But those numbers do not tell the full story of what we witnessed from inside the industry.
When People Started Selling Everything
Online stores began offering products we had never expected Moroccans to purchase that way.
E-commerce was no longer limited to clothes, watches and beauty products. We saw stores selling fruit and vegetables, fish, snacks, groceries and simple local products whose sellers had never considered building a website before the pandemic.
Some young people had lost their jobs or sources of income and began searching for products they could sell. Merchants who had relied entirely on physical shops discovered that an online page could make the difference between remaining in business and shutting down.
But this transition was not as romantic as it is sometimes portrayed today.
A merchant did not simply create a store, launch an advertisement and wake up the following morning to find money falling from the sky.
Advertising campaigns consumed entire budgets without producing a single order. Products that appeared promising attracted no buyers. Customers placed orders and then stopped answering their phones. Some parcels arrived in the correct city but never reached the customer. Others were returned after the merchant had already paid delivery costs in both directions.
We saw all of this through the customer support team.
That was when I understood that support is not merely a department that answers questions. It is where you see the market without makeup.
Developers see buttons and systems. Marketers see traffic and conversion rates. The support team hears the merchant’s voice when money is lost, orders stop arriving, or nobody understands what went wrong.
Because I oversaw support, content and social media while contributing to product management, I stood at the point where these different worlds met.
A merchant would describe a problem in their own words. We had to understand it and turn it into useful content, a note for the product team, or a feature that the developers could build.
We were not simply developing a platform. We were learning about the market alongside the people using it.
E-commerce Did Not Create Opportunities for Merchants Alone
One of the biggest lessons I took from that period was that an online store does not create only one job.
Behind every store that began selling regularly, someone was needed to confirm orders. Someone else managed advertisements. Photographers produced product images, editors created videos, fulfilment teams stored and packaged goods, and drivers or shipping companies delivered parcels.
Small delivery companies began appearing in different Moroccan cities. Young people started learning media buying, sales-page copywriting and customer service. The telephone call used to confirm an order, which may appear to be a simple task, became daily work required by thousands of merchants.
Every order moved through a chain of people before reaching the customer.
That changed how I understood e-commerce.
It was no longer just a person selling a product from a laptop. It had become a small economy moving behind the screen, creating new opportunities, problems and professions.
In September 2021, more than a year after this wave began, I gave a newspaper interview about the future of e-commerce in Morocco. Its headline was:
“E-commerce: A Solution to the Unemployment Problem.”
I did not see e-commerce only as a collection of stores generating sales. I saw an ecosystem that began with the merchant and extended to support, photography, advertising, call centres, packaging and delivery.
I had watched many of those professions take shape from inside YouCan.
YouCan Was at the Heart of That Moment
I cannot tell the story of that period without talking about YouCan because I experienced the transformation from inside the platform.
In my personal view, YouCan was the most important platform to emerge from Morocco during that period for local, Arab and African e-commerce.
That was not simply because of the number of stores it hosted. The platform made it possible for someone with no programming knowledge or large technical budget to create an online store.
Not everything was perfect. Not every feature was ready, and we made many mistakes. But YouCan was growing alongside a market that was forming around us at remarkable speed.
According to figures published by YouCan, the gross merchandise value processed through stores hosted on the platform increased from $88 million during its launch year to $753 million in 2023.
These are company-reported figures rather than an independent measurement of YouCan’s market share, but they illustrate the scale of the platform’s growth after that first launch.
Whenever I see those numbers, I remember the café in Khemisset.
I remember listening to unfamiliar words without understanding what they meant. Only a few months later, those words had become part of my daily life: orders, shipping, support, advertising, merchants, products, angry customers and others celebrating the first sale of their lives.
COVID Accelerated the Change, but It Did Not Guarantee Success
People often say that COVID created the e-commerce boom.
That is only partly true.
The pandemic forced consumers to try online shopping and pushed merchants to search for new ways to sell. It accelerated a transformation that had already begun.
But it did not make e-commerce easy, and it did not turn every online store into a successful business.
What the pandemic removed was part of the psychological resistance.
Merchants who had insisted that they did not need the internet were forced to experiment with it. Customers who had refused to buy remotely found themselves doing exactly that. Young people who had considered online work an illusion saw others around them generate real income from it.
When lockdown ended, however, the old rules of commerce remained.
You still needed a product people wanted, a convincing offer, trust, good service and a careful calculation of costs. If acquiring an order cost you 50 dirhams and half your orders were rejected or returned, even the most beautiful platform in the world could not save your business.
That side of the story rarely appears in revenue screenshots and success videos.
Many people who present themselves as e-commerce experts show only their revenue. Very few reveal how much remained after advertising, shipping and returned orders were deducted.
As we say in Morocco:
Many people who present themselves as e-commerce experts show impressive revenue figures. Very few reveal what remains after advertising costs, shipping fees, rejected orders and returned parcels are deducted.
Revenue may look impressive in a screenshot, but profit tells the real story.
They show you the revenue, but very few show you what they actually kept.
What Remains of That Period?
I entered e-commerce in 2019 knowing almost nothing about it.
I then found myself inside a platform preparing for launch. A few weeks later, I was living through a pandemic that transformed consumer and merchant behaviour and pushed an entire sector to grow faster than we had anticipated.
I did not observe that period from a distance or discover it years later in a report. I lived it through the support, content, marketing and product teams. Every day, I heard the stories, problems and attempts of merchants trying to understand this changing market.
That is why, when I hear someone present e-commerce to young people as a shortcut to wealth, I know that half the story has been removed.
Yes, e-commerce created real opportunities, changed lives and contributed to the emergence of new services, professions and companies.
But it also created losses and illusions for people who entered the market believing it was a machine that printed money.
COVID did not create e-commerce in Morocco.
YouCan did not turn every user into a successful merchant.
The pandemic forced us to discover a market we had previously hesitated to enter, and YouCan brought the technical gateway to that market closer to thousands of people.
I entered through that gateway before I fully understood where it led.
It began with my resignation from Hespress, an old friend, my first meeting with Simo Life, and a conversation in a café in Khemisset where I understood very little of what was being said.
Years later, I realised that I had not simply been listening to a presentation about a new platform.
I had been listening to the beginning of a new era for e-commerce in Morocco, just before COVID pressed the fast-forward button.