Elteema

Closing the gap between local Nigerian sellers and markets

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Inspiration

Local producers like farmers and fabric producers are doing the most work and not getting paid enough for their efforts. Most of the profits are going to the pockets of middle men who help bring the products to the markets.

What it does

Elteema provides a platform that allows local sellers to sell directly to the market without having to go through the middlemen. The platform allows sellers to open their store, list their products, sell directly to over 200 million Nigerians and get paid immediately the order is is complete.

How we built it

Latest and fast technologies were chosen in the process of building this. Cloudfare is used to handle load balance, prevent firewall attacks and also primarily handles the DNS. Nexj js was used for the frontend in order to leverage on th inbuilt caching and optimization of images since this app will have a lot lot of product images. The backend was built using Node JS as we wanted to just keep the language the same with the frontend for future maintenance. Product images are saved on AWS SE bucket and product details are saved in MongoDB database.

Challenges we ran into

The initial plan was to have the product images saved directly on the server and transfer the images to aws once the app hit like 100 users but after we had listed like 20 products, we noticed a high latency so we had to pivot to s3 earlier. We also had a problem with the emailing service as the smtp port clashed with the MX records for our domain. After a few research, we figured out that we could this problem using Cloudfare. After allowing Cloudfare to handle our DNS, this problem was solved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have been able to build a functioning ecommerce platform that will solve a lot of problems in the Nigerian agricultural sectore by directly allowing farmers to sell their products straight from the farm at their own price. This is also applicable to fashion designers who sell their finished products to middlemen at a reasonable price but these products gets shipped to the target market with a price tag 10x the cost price.

What we learned

Introducing a digital solution to the Nigerian local market requires a lot work, from continous information to explain what we are bulinding and how it helps to literally holding people's hand while shwoing them how to use the app. People don't just want to change but change is innevitable in the digital age. We don't want our farmers and market women to be left behind.

What's next for Elteema

Currently we rely on Uber and self-service for order deliveries, we plan to integrate amazon like delivery system in to the app that would allow users who wish to work as delivery drivers to pick from the blocks and proceed to deliver.

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