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Vyappar splash screen
Inspiration
Do you remember those fond childhood memories of eating from your school friend’s lunchbox and thinking, “Wow, your mother is such a good cook I wish she could cook my lunch!"? Well, what if we said that was possible? Not just for food but for a variety of things out there? Our dream is a world with self-sufficient and self-sustaining local communities, thus encouraging the concept of ‘atmanirbharta’.
What it does
We aim to change how the world works by providing an online platform for individuals, cottage industries, micro-businesses and entrepreneurs to start any business. The app’s basic framework is an E-commerce platform, on which anyone can sell a product or service, that they made locally, to a consumer looking for them all within their own community in offline cases and a broader reach in-case of an online case. This makes each neighborhood self-sufficient. These products include but are not limited to eatables, tuitions, art, vocational freelance, classes, business outsourcing etc. Through this, not only are we helping small businesses flourish, but also, creating many more and inspiring people by giving them a new and strong customer base. The concept of the app is to provide the vendor a page with two sections, one to list out their products and services with their details and the other to self-advertise them via a social media feed. We will also be including an inbuilt business tool which will help the vendor calculate their finances and manage their resources better to develop their business. In addition to basic menus and pages the customers will be having a map of their local neighborhood where they can search and look for top and suggested vendors in their locality. The best part is that there is no sign-up cost. The vendors and customers can change roles and switch their interfaces depending on their needs. We will be providing them delivery services. There will be a forum where the users of a locality can discuss things and get together too!!! Our target audience is anyone with a skill that is valuable to society or is in demand. Examples: • A roadside local tailor. •Unemployed teachers can teach online classes. •College students freelancing tuitions or other skills. •Housewives can sell their baked goods. •Fruit and vegetable vendors and local butchers.
How we built it
Currently, the prototype is being developed as an Android application. We have a vision to take this to every household in our country, because there is at least one talented individual in each 500 sq.ft measure and so is the demand for high quality homemade or local products and services that this application offers.
i)Platform for Purchase/Selling: Sellers list their products and price.
ii) Chat box: A chat box between customers and vendors for clearing up any queries/ negotiations for price.
iii)Transportation integration: Integration with delivery apps like swiggy, client delivery, customer pickup, local delivery.
iv) Authentication of users: Verification of sellers will be done through KYC. Verification of quality of products will be implemented on a later stage based on image processing techniques.
v) Payment integration: The application will have multiple secure transaction pathways such as but not limited to BHIM.
vi) User friendliness: For ease of use, we will be providing translations to local languages and including a virtual map with pins and popups of sellers nearby. The popups will display the seller details. A 24/7 online chat-based customer service which the provision of voice calls during working hours.
vii) Vendor rating system: A rating system for checking and giving reviews of the vendors.
viii) Security guidelines: Safety guidelines and terms and conditions document will be published. Emergency and SOS features will be included in the app.
Challenges we ran into
We often buy products and services made commercially or imported in some form but there are a lot of people out there with hobbies and other vocational skills that are unable to monetize them. Many people have discovered new hobbies and passions during the lockdown that they could sell and profit from. Although here’s the catch, not everyone has the time or luxury to get reach and manage services to achieve the same. Be it a 40-year old housewife who bakes the best cookies in town, the tailor that stitches beautiful shirts, the unemployed teacher that is the smartest in the area, the fruit vendor who has the ripest mangoes or that college student who can code entire apps in a week who so surprisingly has a sister that is on par with picasso, these people might be held back from monetizing their passions due to lack of resources. There is a high demand for fresh locally produced products and we aim to satisfy that by looking into our own neighborhoods before importing items.
What's next for Vyappar
India has now the hub for e-commerce. Due to eCommerce companies like Flipkart and Amazon is competing with each other, VyAPPar on the other hand has taken a different approach altogether. As VyAPPar enables small businesses, it is targeting the un-organised sector of India. According to a report, the unorganised sector has an estimated worth of $700 Billion. So, by targeting the Unorganised sector, VyAPPar reduced its competition and increased the chances of being the Big Shot. It will also lure the investors as this sector is unexplored and it is giving a platform to the local suppliers to reach out to the large customer.
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