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Covid-19 is decimating small businesses and ravaging the economy. Social distancing, wearing masks, and many other hurdles have caught small businesses off guard.
The migration of shops to e-commerce platforms is a daunting task and uncharted territory for many small business owners. They fear high costs and have little understanding about online marketing. Small business who do venture online are hard to find and search engines are not always a good way to find local stores and their goods and services.
Small business owners who try other online marketplaces, such as Amazon, find the fees and costs exorbitant, and many of the platforms practices and policies unfair. They find it hard to make a profit and abandon all hope to generate money online.
Other try their hand with solo sites and programs like Squarespace, Shopify, or custom made sites, and find the costs can be add up as add-ons, services, marketing, hiring skilled programmers and marketers become a costly venture without any true result or profit to make the effort worth while.
Local consumers have a hard time finding local products in their city, village, or town and have them delivered to their door. They are more likely to go towards sites such as Amazon and Walmart and overlook their local shops and services that might give the same product at a fairer price, better quality, and with much better personalised service.
How much better it would be to have a marketplace particularly built for small shops and small business owners close to you. It would be easier find local products and services and have products delivered to your door. Small business owners would have their location online, their products simply found with a search engine, all this without the need to code or pay programmers, or get suckered in high cost platforms like Shopify, and many others, and without paying big techs exorbitant costs to sell or advertise on their platforms.
A new marketplace, a new platform just for them, a place to find your local merchant, and buy their products or services online. A better and safer way to shop, and frankly, with Covid-19 epidemic raging, a platform we need to save small businesses.
So what is it that we propose? What makes this idea better?
We propose a multi-merchant marketplace for local merchants that is geo-specific, that is to say, an online marketplace where one can search a product located in a specific place, or one can search for a store and find out what they have in stock. In this way consumers can shop across their city, browse, and buy local products online and have it delivered to their door.
Advantages for shop owners
1- An online shop that is a low cost ($15 a month + 5%)
2- A shared platform with other merchants that might attract more traffic than a solo site
3- The shops customer is their customer. Not Citify's
4- Free advertising and ranking online
Advantages for shoppers
1- An easy way to find local products and have them delivered to their door.
2- Shopping online and compare local products and services, looking for bargains, without leaving the home or from anywhere with internet connection.
3- A Private and safe way to shop and find new favourite stores.
4- Can be used while travelling and finding products in a new city.
5- Shop via our app on your phone, or desktop, laptop.
The local online marketplace might become an integral and important way to shop for local goods and services as we are facing problems due to the Covid-19 epidemic. We hope that the development and application of this app and online service will help local merchants to have an easy ability to sell online and generate revenue.
So why are we raising funds?
Building a really good marketplace that we believe might be advantageous for us all either directly in indirectly requires a lot of money.
1- We need money to hire some talented software programmers that can make the marketplace far far better and as envisioned.
2- Marketing to show off the marketplace and promote mass adoption.
So welcome, and please consider supporting this effort, that we believe will help local shops to migrate online, help small business generate revenue, and possibly save jobs and contribute to the local economy.
Here are some of the links for some of the work we have done thus far.
https://citifymarketplace.com/
https://ads.citifymarketplace.com/
We also have the Chrome extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/citif...
and Android app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=c...
Citify Marketplace: What is in your city?
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