AHMED.AYOUTTY ← Work
Case study · DTC e-commerce (client, anonymized) · Egypt · COD

137K EGP of ads turned into 564K EGP of sales. Here's the honest number under the headline.

A conversational-commerce engine for a cash-on-delivery market where the chat is the checkout — built to scale buyer conversations without blowing up cost-per-conversation, and reported with gross and delivered ROAS side by side.

When the ads ran, the store ran

With ads live (Nov–Feb), the store cleared roughly 117K EGP/month. With ads off (Mar–Apr), it fell to about 5.5K EGP/month — a ~21× drop. That is correlation, not proof — but it is stark, and it is the kind of honest framing I put on every report.

Four honest ways to read the ROAS

I quote gross and delivered together. In a COD market, returns are part of the truth — so the headline 4.1× and the collected 1.9× both appear on the report, never one without the other.

COD reality — order status: ~46% delivered, the rest in transit or returned, with a ~33% return rate on resolved orders (typical for Egyptian COD). The gap between gross and delivered is the most important data point, and it is the one most reports leave out.

The standout: 4,337 buyer chats from one campaign

A single messaging campaign opened 4,337 conversations at ~4.9 EGP (~$0.10) each on a 6.6% CTR. Across the account, conversation-objective campaigns produced 10,000+ DM threads — a real WhatsApp/Messenger commerce funnel, not vanity reach. The #1 sales category (phone holders, 29% of revenue) was matched by dedicated holder campaigns — targeting tracked actual demand, not assumptions.

What this proves

A repeatable creative-to-conversation system can move real volume in a COD market — and be reported honestly, with the returns named instead of hidden. The flattering number sells the engagement; the collected number is the engagement.

Limitations: the client is anonymized (no brand or personal names) by agreement. Figures are account-aggregated actuals for the engagement window; the ads-on/ads-off comparison is correlation, not a controlled test. Egyptian COD return rates are market-typical and vary by category and season.

Talk about a system like this →