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The e-commerce growth has benefited many companies, particularly because the Covid-19 pandemic restricted in-store buying. Online buying has since grow to be the brand new norm for a lot of, propelling e-commerce platforms to achieve immense recognition over the previous few years.
Amidst the success that many of those companies and platforms have discovered, two entrepreneurs discovered {that a} phase of the Singapore market was not well-served by the e-commerce growth: brick-and-mortar shops.
“I read about a new food brand that met my dog’s special dietary requirements. Even though there were three pet stores within two kilometres of where I lived at the time, a search on Google only showed Shopee and Lazada listings,” Jan Gasparic, co-founder of Fairmart, informed Vulcan Post.
“On my way home one day, I popped into one of the pet shops in my neighbourhood and they had it in the store this whole time! It’s the 21st century and we’re sending rockets into space, yet we can’t easily view the products carried by stores in our vicinity?”
Jan was not alone in his frustration. A fellow entrepreneur that he met within the Entrepreneur First program, Daniil Moskovtsov, expressed the identical sentiments. Together, they determined to launch a startup that might assist these brick-and-mortar shops get their merchandise on-line.
While they have been each eager on pursuing their new concept, they confronted a tough problem: the Covid-19 pandemic. The founders have been primarily based in numerous elements of the world after they determined to work collectively, and didn’t meet in particular person till six months after beginning to work collectively.
“Our early days were all remote and we were shipping prototypes between New Zealand and Hong Kong, where we were both based previously. Building a company with someone you’ve never met in person was challenging, but like so many things during the pandemic, we just got on with it and got it done,” mentioned Jan.
Tech is a superb equaliser
Upon researching the issues that brick-and-mortar shops confronted, they discovered some points that wanted to be addressed.
Existing platforms have been designed for on-line shops, which usually offered a smaller collection of merchandise. On the opposite hand, they discovered that retail shops usually carried over 2,000 merchandise. As such, it could be an enormous problem for these shops to manually key within the information for his or her merchandise onto on-line platforms.
Additionally, whereas customers nonetheless principally purchase merchandise offline, the overwhelming majority of customers seek for merchandise on-line first. This is why retail shops lose greater than US$4.5 billion in gross sales to digital rivals yearly — all as a result of retail retailer merchandise have been merely not searchable on-line.
Therefore, Fairmart determined to assist them automate this course of. Using their good scanner, partnering retailers can merely scan the barcode of their merchandise, and the information will likely be printed on Fairmart’s web page, together with Google and Facebook.
Shoppers which might be searching for particular merchandise will then see the merchandise on search engines like google and yahoo, and may both head to the shop to purchase, reserve the product, or buy them on-line.
Thanks to their good scanner, a job that might have taken over 200 hours of guide information entry could possibly be achieved in lower than half an hour.
Fairmart is fixing the perennial issues that stop native retailers from leveraging the advantages of digitisation, beginning with probably the most labour and time-intensive job of managing on-line stock. By enabling automated listings, Fairmart helps native customers discover what they’re trying to find, whereas enabling retailers to give attention to what they do greatest: driving gross sales and buyer engagement.
– Jan Gasparic, co-founder of Fairmart
In addition to serving to these shops listing their merchandise on-line, Fairmart additionally permits these shops to higher perceive their efficiency by means of information analytics.
Brick-and-mortar shops typically would not have the information wanted for enterprise choices, however with digitalisation, they’ll see which of their merchandise are being sought out on-line, and resolve which of them to inventory.
“One of our clients was very surprised when we showed him that niche products in his inventory were attracting more new customers than what he thought were his ‘hero’ products. The data we provide empowers retailers to understand what customers are searching for and supports their assortment decisions,” shared Jan.
In change for entry to Fairmart’s platform, retailer homeowners pay a month-to-month subscription payment of S$50 for being listed on Fairmart’s platform.
Fairmart’s future
“Brick-and-mortar stores is a massive market, [worth] around US$625 million in Southeast Asia. And yet, so few technology companies are building solutions for them. There’s an enormous opportunity to unlock digital commerce for this segment,” famous Jan, including that Fairmart is barely getting began in revolutionising the e-commerce panorama.
Last month, the startup introduced the closing of an oversubscribed seed funding spherical, led by Quest Ventures and Entrepreneur First. The spherical raised S$2 million of funding, and Fairmart will likely be utilizing this recent funding to proceed increasing their pool of shoppers.
Fairmart can also be planning to make enhancements to their information analytics, and hopes to supply data-driven insights for his or her prospects.
After all, as e-commerce booms, brick-and-mortar shops are struggling to outlive and Jan believes that Fairmart helps to provide these shops “a fair shot” to compete with their on-line equivalents.
“D2C e-commerce was the first wave of digitising retail. The second wave has been the giant marketplaces such as Shopee and Lazada. Fairmart is the next wave where we take all the tools that the big players have, and make them available to every local and neighbourhood store out there,” he added.
Featured Image Credit: Entrepreneur First
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