One person in Egypt runs a resale market for phones and computers only: a few merchant subscriptions put it at #3 on the shopping Top Grossing chart

Vatix is an Egyptian classifieds app for electronics only. Its developer is a person named Mahmoud Abdelraouf, and the only app on the account is this one. Nov 6 It ranked #3 on the shopping Top Grossing chart in Egypt's App Store. The ranking is real, but that chart's bar is absurdly low. This piece looks at what got it onto the chart, where the money comes from, where the users come from, and whether it's worth doing in another country.

A video with 120k views

On 2026 Sep 23, Vatix's TikTok account @vatix_store posted a video with this caption in Egyptian dialect:

معاك جهاز عايز تبيعه؟ متفكرش كتير نزله علي فاتيكس — اول منصه في مصر متخصصه في الإلكترونيات بس

It means: "Got a device to sell? Don't overthink it, list it on Vatix, Egypt's first marketplace for electronics only." As of Nov 6 it had 120k views and 847 likes. The account has 37 videos and 1,944 followers in total, and most of its other videos get only a couple hundred views.

The video went up 9 days before the iOS app launched in Sep 14. The Android version came earlier: the oldest review on Google Play is from Aug 24, and the user writes, "I was the first to download it, I'd asked the website to make an app before." So it had a website, vatix.store, first, then an Android app in late August and an iOS app in mid-September.

What it is

Basically a Xianyu-style secondhand marketplace for electronics, plus 58 local listings: phones, laptops, earbuds, monitors, game consoles, new or used. You can filter by brand, province, and price. Buyers and sellers connect via WhatsApp, phone, or in-app chat and close the deal themselves. The platform doesn't touch the money or handle shipping.

The first line of the store description reads "Vatix — سوق الإلكترونيات الأول في مصر" (Egypt's first electronics marketplace). The whole interface is in Arabic.

How big is it really?

Not big. A few figures we can verify:

For a personal project that launched two or three months ago, reaching over ten thousand downloads and around a thousand merchants (if the self-reported numbers are accurate) is a decent start, but it's far from "blowing up."

How it reached #3 on the chart

The key is how it makes money and who else is on that chart.

Vatix doesn't charge buyers. It charges merchants: 599.99 EGP to open a store page on iOS, 999.99 EGP for the higher Store Plus tier, and 199.99–699.99 EGP to pin a single listing (about $4–$20). On iOS all of these go through Apple's in-app purchase, so they count toward the chart.

Meanwhile, on Egypt's shopping Top Grossing chart, big apps like Noon, Amazon and dubizzle, which sell physical goods and don't use in-app purchase, don't appear at all. 11-06 Ranking next to Vatix are small utility apps: package trackers, T-shirt design tools, "free app of the day" recommenders. On a chart like that, a few to a dozen merchant payments a day can put you in the top few spots (inference). Its rank jumping from #30 to #3 within a week itself shows the volume is tiny, and a handful of orders can swing the ranking a lot.

It also appeared on Uzbekistan's shopping Top Grossing chart (ranked #24–#55), but that store had a rating count of 0, most likely one or two stray purchases that can be ignored.

So "#3 on the chart" is more of a signal that merchants are paying. It doesn't mean the business has grown large.

Where users come from

TikTok, and very likely paid promotion. The videos from Aug 13, 23 and 28 each got 19k to 30k views but only 14 to 23 likes; the Sep 23 video got 120k views with a like rate under 1%. Organic videos usually get much higher like rates, and "high views, almost no engagement" is typically what paid promotion looks like (inference, no ad library evidence). The timing lines up with when Android and iOS started gaining traction.

Almost all of these videos use the same hook, aimed at sellers' pain points:

• "Tired of spamming comments on Facebook? Vatix handles it for you." (9-11)
• "The problem isn't that there aren't enough devices for sale, it's that they're not sorted. You keep scrolling and what you get isn't the model you want or the price you want." (8-28)
• "Buying used isn't a gamble anymore: on Vatix, check the device condition and the seller's rating before you spend a dime." (8-13)

These lines target Egypt's usual used-electronics hangouts: Facebook groups and Marketplace. Posting there, your listing gets buried in minutes, and there's no way to filter by model or price.

Facebook and Instagram pages also post referral content like "open Vatix to compare prices," and the pages were created in 2026. We couldn't find whether Meta ads were run.

Merchants bring in buyers for it (inference). Paid stores get a shareable standalone page and a printable QR code; the website says "share to WhatsApp and Instagram, or print the QR." A phone shop that posts the QR code on the counter and sends the link to its customer group is effectively recruiting people for the platform.

No press coverage. Searching X for Vatix and the Arabic "فاتيكس" turned up no relevant discussion in the past 90 days, and there are no Reddit threads either. Few people know it exists.

Why merchants pay

The website's pricing page draws a clear line between free and paid:

• Free accounts get up to 10 live listings; store plans have no listing limit.
• The store plan includes a professional store page, logo and cover image, view counts per listing, how many people tapped your phone number, favorites, and 7/14/30-day view trend charts.
• Followers get new-listing notifications; you can manage multiple branches, each with its own phone number.
• 14-day free trial, no card required.

Prices on the web are cheaper than on iOS: the store plan is 450 EGP a month, or 4,500 EGP a year (two months free). The web accepts InstaPay and mobile wallets from Vodafone, Etisalat and Orange, which are common payment methods in Egypt. The iOS price is over 30% higher, roughly the gap Apple takes as its cut.

Another design choice is worth noting: buyers can post "wanted" requests, and an assistant called "Jeeko" (جيكو) asks sellers and collects their quotes. Buyers post wanted requests for free. Free merchants get a limited number of quotes per month; paid ones get unlimited. Buyer demand becomes the reason merchants upgrade.

For a phone shop in Cairo, 450 EGP a month (under $10) buys a traffic pool of buyers who are only looking for electronics, a store page to send to regulars, and a count of how many people called. That math works.

What users say

The reviews are plain. On iOS, a five-star review from Sep 19: "جددت تليفوني عن طريقه ❤️" (I upgraded my phone through it). Nov 2: "Good, selling is easy." On Play, Sep 16: "I'm still trying it, but it looks organized, simple and safe."

The bad reviews point to a rough product. On iOS, a one-star review from Oct 13 titled "very bad user experience": "lots of bugs that need testing; no iOS habits like swipe-back; the chat input box jumps to the top of the screen." On Play, someone asked for dark mode, and someone said they couldn't recover their password.

Who it's competing with

The real rivals are dubizzle and Facebook. Vatix's play is to carve out one category beneath them: electronics have high unit prices and frequent secondhand trades, there are lots of phone and computer shops, and sellers hate getting buried on general platforms. I haven't seen anyone copy it yet.

If it were you

Verdict: C. There's a playbook here, "charge merchants on a vertical secondhand market," worth learning, but copying it directly isn't a good bet. Chart position mostly reflects a low bar for the chart; the underlying revenue is probably only a handful of sales a day. Two-sided marketplaces are cold-start businesses: moving to another country means recruiting merchants and buyers from scratch, with no shortcut.

Who it suits: people who have run an offline merchant business in some country and can visit phone and computer shops one by one, or who already have merchant relationships (e.g., from phone accessories wholesale or repair). Markets where general classifieds platforms are strong but nobody has a dedicated electronics product yet, such as Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh (inferred, not verified one by one).

Who it doesn't suit: people who only write code and expect users to show up once the app is live. The hard part of this business isn't the tech; the first few hundred merchants have to be recruited by hand. Also not for the US or Europe: eBay, Back Market, Swappa already exist, and Facebook Marketplace has covered this ground thoroughly.

How to build it: follow its structure. Buyers are free; merchants get a few free ads, a monthly shop plan, and pay-per-pin listings; shop pages are standalone web pages that can be shared and have printable QR codes; add "wanted requests + merchant quotes," with limited quotes for free merchants. Take payments on web through local wallets; in-app purchase on the App Store also works, since it gets you onto the local shopping chart, which is almost free exposure in countries where the big players don't use IAP.

How to get users: supply side first. Recruit merchants, then push buyers. On TikTok, run short videos like "Got an old phone to sell?" in local dialect with real phone shops as the footage; meanwhile have the first merchants stick QR codes on their counters. Vatix got over 10,000 installs in two months from a few promo videos, so the starting cost is low.

Is there a window? Not urgent. This kind of opportunity doesn't depend on timing; it depends on whether you have merchant relationships locally. But if you plan to ride the shopping chart's exposure, move before dubizzle, OpenSooq and similar platforms start selling memberships via Apple IAP in that market.

Signs I'm wrong: ① over the next month or two Vatix holds a top 10 spot on Egypt's shopping chart and its rating count accelerates visibly (currently about 1–2 a day), showing merchant payments are really scaling. It's bigger than it looks and deserves a closer look; ② conversely, if it drops out of the top 50 and TikTok stops posting, merchants aren't sticking after the promotion stops; ③ if dubizzle launches electronics merchant storefronts in Egypt, or copies the wanted-quote model, the room for a vertical play shrinks.