marchalocal.eu

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  Business Graph

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  Logo

Inspiration

In retail, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across Europe are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic side-effects: locked-down customers, closed stores, empty streets, and no means to put their products on the market. Small businesses without an online presence are already struggling to survive in a world increasingly dominated by online shopping during normal times. At the moment, they have no platform for customers to access their products or do not have delivery capacity. For those businesses which can offer delivery, customers still lose the ability to ‘window shop’ and discover new stores or featured products. In addition, postal delivery services are overwhelmed with increased demand due to the shift to e-commerce. Furthermore, when the restrictions are lifted, people might still be weary of unnecessary contact, thus slowing the return of sales of small stores. Therefore, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis might stretch beyond the time at which restriction of movement measures apply.

What it does

marchàlocal reimagines local shopping by providing an online marketplace where traditional local businesses can easily create digital storefronts and sell to customers in their proximity. marchàlocal is a fully integrated, innovative platform that handles the entire online shopping process. The platform allows for shops to sign-up, upload an inventory, and indicate areas they offer delivery in. Customers provide their country and ZIP code and then can browse a selection of shops and products available at their location. This creates a platform that is at once global in reach and still retains a very local feel for every user of the site. Moreover, the website is in multiple languages and can thus be scaled to meet thousands or even millions of people. By being on a single platform, we offer small shops much-needed visibility and customers get the pleasant one-stop-shop experience they expect from online shopping, which normally drives them towards doing their online shopping at large companies. In addition, marchàlocal enables small businesses to operate their delivery effectively through integration with local courier services, a framework to cooperate with other shops nearby, and pool delivery runs which utilizes a technically complex route optimization functionality for maximum efficiency. We thus provide the means for regional online shopping independent of postal service.

How we built it

Initial prototypes of marchàlocal were developed in wordpress with a woocommerce multi vendor marketplace and an airtable backend. This soon proved to be insufficient for our needs, so we switched to bubble. Bubble is a coding free web development environment that enabled us to implement all the important features we needed, such as location based search, and multi language support as well as the possibility for integration of payment gateways at a later stage. We were able to integrate google maps directions service to provide a fully functional route finding process. Summarized, our prototype can be turned into a ready to use product within weeks.

Challenges we ran into

The two main challenges were time constraint and partial lack of development knowledge. The entire team has a technical background but is quite inexperienced in web development, which initially made it difficult to gauge which available services would be the best fit for our needs. Combined with time constraints, some features such as payment gateway integration remained out of reach during the time of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Implemented functional delivery dashboard with route optimization
• Made transnational shopping and routing possible in prototype and included multiple countries.
• Obtained market knowledge through conducting extensive interviews with stakeholders
• Fleshed out business plan into a fully fledged proposal.
• Translated prototype into our fifth language.
• Increased visual appeal of prototype.

What we learned

It was a great experience to further develop our marchàlocal idea in a collaborative environment. Especially the inputs obtained from our mentor on thinking about how we differentiate ourselves from other services helped to further shape our business model and our go to market strategy. We implemented those thoughts into our website and have now a fully functional delivery route optimization implementation.

What's next for marchalocal.eu

Our main goal for the future is to move fast to bring the most economic benefit to small businesses in this unprecedented time. Given the demands on security and scalability, marchàlocal is in the process of obtaining increased funding to be able to collaborate with established professional marketplace software solution providers. To achieve this, we are currently applying to multiple start up funding schemes.

Built With

• bubble