Inspiration
97% of the Indonesian workforce work in Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), making them the key engine to economic growth yet the tools provided to empower them are untapped.
The quantity of transactions with local retailers are so huge, yet there isn't a way for them to use the data to optimize their businesses as analytics on buying patterns remain untracked.
One might rarely buy from existing ecommerce sites, but buying from local retailers is almost done every day. Hence there is a huge influx of uncaptured data and reach out there that can help both customers and retailers.
From the customers perspective, they are locked into existing services which makes finding niche items extremely hard and expensive.
Therefore there's an immediate need for a system to help connect small businesses and customers which in turn will yield better quality products and lower delivery points.
What it does
Tokofy is a platform that provides an ecosystem for small businesses and customers to connect and interact. Our goal is to empower small businesses by giving them access to data such as reach, supply and demand prediction from customer buying patterns at the same time providing a rich experience to customers through location and historic based product recommendations.
The platform enables existing stores to go online by onboarding their inventory details and reach their target customers while they place orders. This generates a historic record of all the data and insights can be provided to retailers on key metrics such as supply and demand, price prediction.
Starting new businesses is hard, so with region based analysis on customer buying patterns we can provide useful insights that will enable retailers to position their selling strategies to gain maximum profit.
Business Aspect
There are about a million SMEs in Indonesia, employing 7.9 million people and contributing about 27% to GDP. With such a huge market, a platform such as Tokofy will bridge the gap between accessibility and growth of small businesses. Having both customers and retailers on the same platform will open up a huge opportunity to build additional features and a profitable business via advertising and subscription.
How we built it
The entire project was built using Flutter for the mobile app and NodeJS to serve the api endpoints. Machine Learning Models is based on Random Forest Regressor, where historic data is fed into the model and it predicts sales for a given month.
Challenges we ran into
The nature of predicting sales is that of a complicated one as it involves a large array of attributes. The challenges we faced were to plan what features we can add in the span of the hackathon.
What's next for Tokofy
With an idea that is based on real world problems, puts us in an unique position to scale from a prototype to production as the strategy is always to bring both buyers and sellers under one platform powered by data all the way.
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