Local Business Network

In India,smartphone and high speed internet penetration has made online shopping ubiquitous even in rural areas. It is hard for local retailers & services to match up with the large corporations. During festive season discount alone,the footfall in physical stores get reduced by 30%. But commodities like fresh vegetables which are not handled by most traditional retailers suffer from another issue. In their cases,the producers don't get right price due to  the hierarchy of middlemen. This utterly inefficient retail and service structure cost great loss for many .

We plan to develop a common platform through which local business holders can collaborate with one another and also producers and workforce to deliver a seamless and efficient experience to consumers .

This may influence and upgrade the lives of community members and ensure inclusive financial growth for them.

This proposed solution is geared towards helping small business and services to access network,funding and skilled workforce.

In India, micro small & medium enterprises contribute 29% of GDP and agriculture contributes 40% of GDP. They together employ >60% of working population. But these small enterprises are continuously lagging behind in new gen business strategies required to remain relevant in this age. If we can order anything on earth at an online store with a variety of discounts, loyalty programs and a satisfying experience, why bother about the store next lane? But it is not easy for these local stores or services to make an online presence as they neither possess the financial nor technical capabilities . Most of them don't satisfy the infrastructure requirements of online retailers.Same thing applies for services like saloons,boutique etc.

The picture is worse for farmers. Tomatoes selling at INR 40-50 /kg in Kolkata could fetch their producers in nearby village only INR 3-4 /kg. They can't take their products to city market daily leaving all their farming. Food products left stored at the middleman's hands and city people feel scarcity & excessive price for products.

We want to build a web platform with a mobile app ("Platform") where local business owners can network,share ideas and interact with customers. It will work as both a B2B & B2C platform. (Maybe 2 separate apps).

B2B Component

Local businesses can use our platform as a medium to network with other locals in same business and order from producers together in bulk to get price advantage. They can agree to lend their extra storage space or share additional resources with their Platform partners.

 Local retailers can make contracts with the actual farmers/producers for their products in advance for suitable price. The system will predict suitable price using past tends and collected data of commodity prices across the specific region. All details will remain neatly documented. Thus they can avoid agents and middlemen. Transport and marketing will be arranged by the partner retailers.

B2C Component

A common framework to take order from customers,manage transactions and show products online. Services like teachers,mechanic can also use it to make their brand page.The system will receive orders online. Customer will collect the goods from store at his / her ease even if the retailer doesn't support shipping.

This solution is targeted to local business owners and service providers as well as farmers and cottage industries.

The solution will make the local businesses to make their digital presence easily through our common B2C framework. (It will be as easy as having a page on a social network site). Consumers will get the convenience to avoid queue at sore as well. The sharing of resources (like storage space, spare commodities) will ensure improved efficiency and financial gain. They can utilize these savings to initiate royalty program locally through our platform.

Farmers will get guaranteed price and buyer in advance. They can ask for advance to the buyers directly instead of taking loans at crazy interest rate from agents. Once successfully implemented,we can partner with NBFCs to provide better financial assistance to them. Rural women can get the right values for their skills . They can reach to wider audience. Their financial independence will ensure the better future for their family.

The problem of inefficient financial structure and marketing system is a great barrier to socioeconomic improvement of marginalized population. Our solution will help local businesses to grow a network and thus getting better access and control over the supply chain. Farmers ,women involved in small scale industries will be able to take their products to market without any complex distribution network.They will gain financial stability, self-employment scope. Overall,consumers will be able to support the local businesses (Actually these businesses give back to their community most). This solution supports the idea of inclusive entrepreneurship.

Online marketplace is quite common now and no way a novel technology. But most of these marketplaces have sophisticated terms and infracstructure requirments for their partners. Very few small town/village retailes can afford it. Besides,why transport  a detergent or tea cup from 800 km away when we can have the same product in the shop next door. We need a democratized online marketoplace where anybody can participate. The network of local enterprises on our network will help them to provide same level of  convenience to the consumers as the lage corporations .

Each year many framers in India commit suicude as they fail to pay their loans even withgood agricultural production. They get rudicuroudsly low price for their  products. Our platform will empower local business networks to reach the original producers directly. A shop can't alone afford the resources, but a group with shared interest can successfully arange the transport and storage while gaining profit from avoiding middleman.Thus,our platform will be able to provide values for both producers and retailers.

Local services can also utilise the system to make their brand presence.

Our solution is powered by web technology and mobile applications,AI. We are not using any novel technology.

We will build an online marketplace for B2C component just like those already exist. It will have an Aadhar (or other govt. provided unique identification scheme) based registration system. The building of this infrastructure is a one - time investment. The subsequent up gradation and maintenance will not cost as much. We will use commonly used web technologies (HTML5,CSS,Django framework,SQL back end). There are plenty of skilled developers with these specializations ,so no HR problem is expected. The mobile app will be the most important component as many Asian & most African nations now have mobile majority.

The B2B component will have a use a SQL back end to maintain database of the members. As most people have experience with social media (at least in India) , they will have an familiar experience. On this platform, they can meet with other business owners and producers. The data abut consumer price and demand gathered from the B2C component will help to train the AI for prediction of proper value for the producers. The AI system will also help producers to take wise decision about their target quantities.We plan to base our solution on Elgg for the web version (elgg.org).We don't expect to start working with anything too sophisticated. But as the system scales up, the ad revenue and subscription fee is expected to be sufficient to maintain the development.

The online marketplace and social networking is widely used by enterprises of all size around the globe. Leave alone large corporations,many medium city stores have their own site. But those are generally poorly designed as most of the local businesses don't gain considerable revenue share from those sites. Companies like Amazon gain from their brand value. Our platform will provide a common parent brand for the marketplace,where many local retailers can have their own virtual stores. We are just replacing many small scattered,unmaintained web stores with a strong single cost-worthy solution.

For the B2B component, Metro cash & Carry as well as few other retail companies in India tried to buy directly from the producers using similar model as ours. But that was a pretty limited solution, those companies till don't have very few footsteps across the nation . Our solution instead try to maximize the use of already available resource and retail infrastructure .

The use of AI to predict the commodity price is somewhat new. This is a proposed feature. We are confident after operating for 3-5 years ,we will have enough data to have confident predictions.

The project is still in concept stage.

We need to get a capable group of IT experts to materialize our goal.We also need office place and initial marketing/awareness fund . Without a stable financial condition to hire few developers/designers we can't progress. So initial investment is the toughest barrier,we need to overcome. We expect the system to be self-sustaining in long run. (within 5 years of operation)