Why we are building EthioBazaar

EthioBazaar is a planned global marketplace connecting Ethiopian businesses, products, services, food, creators and communities with customers around the world. The short version of the idea fits in four words: Discover. Shop. Eat. Connect.

The longer version is that EthioBazaar should become a digital home for Ethiopian commerce and culture, wherever Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia happen to live.

What it is not

It is easy to picture a smaller product, so let us be clear about what EthioBazaar is not intended to be only:

• a restaurant delivery app
• a food directory
• an Ethiopian grocery store
• a social network

Food is where many people will meet EthioBazaar first, but the brand is not restricted to food. The plan is a broad marketplace ecosystem that covers what Ethiopian communities buy, sell, cook, make and celebrate:

• Food: restaurants, cafés, Ethiopian coffee, catering, delivery, pickup and reservations
• Shopping: grocery stores, food products, coffee, teff, berbere, shiro, spices and traditional foods
• Fashion: habesha and traditional clothing, jewellery, accessories and handmade products
• Beauty: beauty and hair products, natural and traditional products
• Home and culture: jebena, coffee ceremony products, décor, baskets and cultural products
• Services: professional services, transport, cleaning, photography, real estate, events, technology, consulting and other Ethiopian-owned services
• Creators and content: chefs, cooking and recipe creators, food bloggers, YouTubers, TikTok and Instagram creators
• Recipes: Ethiopian recipes, cooking videos, step-by-step lessons and food education
• Community: Ethiopian events, cultural events, food festivals and community activities

The marketplace has to stay flexible enough to support categories we only discover later.

Global from day one

The waitlist is global from the first day. We are not restricting it to Ethiopia, Dubai, Washington DC, London or any other single market. People from anywhere in the world can join.

That is a deliberate choice. We do not want to guess which country or city should launch first. We want the data to tell us. Every member gives us a country and a city, which lets us look at demand and supply at city level rather than by rumour.

The waitlist is also our market research

The landing page is not simply an email collection page. It is a landing page, a global waitlist, a smart branching survey, a market research system and a business recruitment channel in one. Through it we want to understand:

• where Ethiopian customers are located
• where Ethiopian businesses are located
• which categories, products and services people want
• which restaurants people want
• what businesses struggle with, and which features they want
• which cities have strong demand, which have strong business supply, and where the two overlap

That is why the survey branches. A restaurant is not asked the same questions as a shopper, and someone who joins from Frankfurt is not asked about Dubai. The answers decide what the first version of the marketplace should actually contain.

Honest numbers only

You will not find claims of thousands of members or dozens of cities on this site unless those numbers exist in our database. Every counter on the landing page is read live from the waitlist, and the founding community grows one real member at a time. Until then, the honest sentence is the one we use: join the growing founding community.

Phase 1, and only Phase 1

We are not building everything immediately. The current phase is validation:

1. Global landing page
2. Global waitlist
3. Branching survey
4. Business recruitment
5. Customer research
6. Creator recruitment
7. Demand analysis
8. Supply analysis

Only after collecting enough evidence will we decide the exact marketplace MVP: business profiles and listings, search and location discovery, and later ordering, payments, pickup, delivery and reservations. There are no promised dates, because the order of the work depends on what the waitlist teaches us.

The questions we are trying to answer

Where are Ethiopian customers? Where are Ethiopian businesses? What do people want to buy, and what do businesses want to sell? What problems do businesses have? Which categories matter most? Which cities have the strongest demand, and which have enough supply? What should we build first?

The answers to those questions will determine the future EthioBazaar marketplace. If you have an answer to any of them, the fastest way to give it to us is to join the waitlist and add your city.

EthioBazaar is being built with the community, not simply for it.