Convergeo

In Zambia, through my studies in economics I have noticed ecommerce has the potential to improve the economy and reduce our reliance on debt for its sustenance and instead switch to the use of local production for economic growth. Local producers produce enough for their families and this is due to uncertainties on whether their produce (be it local grain and fruit farms or local livestock and fish farms) will be sold at the market.

The proposal of Convergeo is to use ecommerce to capture the local businesses to boost the economy by infiltrating every market in the economy to simulate money circulation and create opportunities, what this means for the global community is a new way to carry on business that improves the standard of living for anyone who can produce and supply within the local economy by converging all business to one place to improve local information.

Zambia’s economy has faced challenges for decades that need to be addressed ASAP, with its GDP without debt acquisitions equaling about $25.7 billion, it’s investment in inventories (stock) being only 1.2% of its GDP and 54.4% of its people living below its poverty line, thus the next best step is to change this.

The rural regions of the nation are the most productive, even more than the commercial producers, but also have the most risk when choosing the scale of crops to grow, livestock to rear and fish to farm, due to poor market opportunities many local produce, produce enough for family consumption and this market gap is where Convergeo comes in.

The problem Convergeo seeks to solve is to boost sales made on local products, services, events and supplies nationwide through the use of the ecommerce sector which still in its infancy locally (thus creating an opportunity for growth) and is the best option, due to ecommerce having almost no limitations. Why is this a problem solver? Well helping local producers take their produce to the digital market and make sells, can improve local dependency rather than relying on imports that are causing more harm to the economy.

In general, it serves all national consumers, but has the potential to be replicated in other developing nations and afterwards forming a crossing country trade platform. By developing Convergeo every business man and woman has the potential to become a digital asset capable of selling to every one within the nation.

Local producers also have the opportunity to sell their produce, their designs, their innovations to all individuals within the nation with their items being categorized according to genre, this then becomes an attempt to boost money circulation and create awareness on money making opportunities within the nation.

My solution to the above presented problem is through the use of ecommerce in Zambia and due to the code being reusable, it can be also applied to neighboring countries (also developing economies). Convergeo, an ecommerce platform is a strategy to boost the economic output through technological means by displaying local products (of viable businesses), purchasing of services (bills, subscriptions, memberships, orders), buying of event tickets (whether public, social gatherings, leisure, sport, networking, etc.) and the purchasing of supplies (quotations, release of tenders on the supply market, etc.) and to make this a possibility by working with all valid local businesses.

My basic technical strategy is to use local money services for the local users (e.g. mobile money services to make purchases and Stripe for visa card purchasers.), to use a headless CMS for data storage (preferably DatoCMS or Strapi to reduce costs), to use Digital Ocean or Mongo Db atlas for hosting and deployment, Nuxtjs for the frontend, while using its PWA to use as an application for  mobile devices (this way creating android, iOS and windows applications will be unnecessary) and for notifications to and from users, clients, suppliers, Convergeo will use One Signal and with all these methods it can count on users having access to the platform even with low network and faster speeds while on the platform. The platform will also use Google maps for locations, routes, etc. and Qrcodes as a purchasing method.

A brief summary of the physical strategy is to set and place 5 mini offices with some warehouses (within cost) for transportation and storage locations in each of Zambia’s 10 provinces also for researching, marketing strategies and data collections and point of sales. The company also wishes to hire sales agents to be distributed locally to improve the number of clients that Convergeo can have, this will be based on how well they do in training and  a commission will be provided for each client they bring (this is because the value having a client on board outweighs the effort to have one on board).

In Zambia, ecommerce is not as progressive even with ecommerce giants like Alibaba, Amazon and eBay dominating the global market. My proposal can be related by example to a merging of Alibaba and Facebook. For me to describe this well let me illustrate this by taking resources from each and merging them into one platform.

Firstly, instead of the web application focusing on family and friends like Facebook does, the focus instead goes to companies, clients, businesses, etc. Secondly when the profile of each client is opened one must be able to see the products, services, events or supplies by the client, thus giving the user room to make a purchase from the available options.

To ensure that it is able to succeed on a global scale, my aim is to test it out on a national scale in Zambia and its neighboring states, with a focus on the local resources within each country to boost the use of products in developing states. This way developing countries can know how to rely on what they produce, before rushing towards imports that then strangle the economies currency.

Many ecommerce businesses focus only on products, but the strategy I’m employing also looks at services (restaurant orders, accommodation prices and payments, gym memberships, etc.), local events (public, social, leisure, etc.) and supplies (through use of providing each client the use of our designed Supply Chain Management (SCM) process from the supplier to the client to the consumer all on one web application.

Convergeo is a web application,that currently uses Nuxtjs as it's frontend and Strapi as its backend, the team decided to go for Nuxtjs, because its is excellent with Search Engine Optimization (SEO, this is to rank well on search engines), It is also great with Server Side Rendering (SSR, all pages are pre-rendered, that means after the first page loads, their are no more page  reloads, this gives the user the perception that pages load faster), Nuxtjs also has a Progressive Web Application (PWA, this is an application that is generated from your actual website, that means no more need to also make android, apple and windows applications that push the costs of development and the best part is it is easy to place the link for the PWA on any social media platform), to accompany the use of the PWA, Convergeo is also using one signal(for handling notifications, promotions, announcements to users, clients and suppliers, The platform has also used Google Maps(for client location, Qrcodes (to support the payment and purchases process) and Charts to inform each client of the process he/she is making on our platform and as a log of their recent activities. Deployment of the website is on Digital Ocean due to the Cheap monthly charges, awesome speeds and 99.99% up-time, Transportation of ite