Coca-Cola Dubai sells into a trade channel that covers all seven Emirates: restaurants, hotels, cafés, retailers, FMCG wholesalers and hospitality venues. For years, that channel ran on phone calls, sales rep visits and paperwork. A restaurant manager who needed to reorder had to reach a rep first, and a question about an invoice or a credit limit meant a call to the accounts team.
Trade apps are a distinct category of work for a mobile app development company in Dubai. The users are buyers placing repeat orders on credit, often from a kitchen or a stockroom, and the app has to fit around a working day with no room for friction. Over nine months, a ten-person design and engineering team at AppVerticals built that kind of platform for Coca-Cola Dubai, working alongside the company’s product stakeholders.
Where the Old Process Broke Down
The old setup carried three costs. Buyers had no way to serve themselves between rep visits. Reps lost time to administrative coordination. And Coca-Cola Dubai’s product and promotional data stayed inside the business, where it did nothing to drive extra orders.
Underneath all three was fragmentation. Ordering, invoicing, credit, account visibility, product discovery and promotions each lived in a different place, so no single view showed a buyer everything they needed.
Designing Around Five Buyer Moments
Before writing production code, the team ran more than 150 prototype iterations. The structure that came out of them follows five moments in a buyer’s day: discover, order, track, manage and get help. Those five moments organize all 92 screens, and AA accessibility compliance was part of the design from the first phase.
The order flow covers browsing, the cart, upsell suggestions, checkout and confirmation, with one-tap reorders from a buyer’s favorites. A barcode scanner lets buyers scan a product in-store and trigger a reorder on the spot. Invoices, payment history, document filters and credit tracking sit in the same app, so questions that used to need a phone call now take a few taps. Trending products, suggestions and market analysis help buyers find items they haven’t ordered before, while offers, special items and a rewards program put the promotional data in front of the people placing orders.
The smaller details got the same attention. Onboarding tutorials walk new buyers through the home screen, products, checkout and order history, and the app adds notifications, profile management and a dark mode.
Ask Arwa: An Assistant That Knows the Account
The platform includes an AI assistant named Arwa. Trade buyers can ask it questions, get product recommendations and resolve order queries, and Arwa works with each buyer’s account context, including order history, credit position and favorite products.
That context is what makes the assistant useful. A hotel procurement lead checking on an order or a credit limit gets an answer specific to their account without calling anyone.
One Codebase, Built for Launch Day
The app runs on iOS and Android from a single React Native codebase, backed by Node.js and PostgreSQL on AWS. Every buyer gets the same app, whatever phone they carry. For a mobile app development company Dubai enterprises bring in on a build this size, one shared codebase also means one team, one release process and one set of tests to maintain.
Buyers open the app under varying connectivity conditions, so speed carried as much weight as features. Launch put that setup under real pressure. The platform handled more than 2 million peak users at launch and reports 99.98% uptime. Median page load sits at 1.2 seconds, user journeys are 45% faster, and the release went live with zero critical bugs.
What Other UAE Distributors Can Take From It
The problems Coca-Cola Dubai faced will sound familiar to plenty of distributors in the region: orders that wait for a rep, account questions that wait for a call back, and promotions buyers never see. The platform answers each one with a specific feature, and its published numbers give other distributors clear targets for load, uptime and speed. The order of work is worth copying too: the design was settled through prototypes before production code began, so the engineers built from a blueprint that had already gone through more than 150 rounds.
The client’s digital transformation lead summed up the working relationship in one line: “AppVerticals was a reliable partner throughout the project.” For trade buyers across the seven Emirates, the change is simpler still. Reordering takes a tap, and the answer to an account question is a message away.