With the onset of COVID19, every brick & mortar business had to move online to stay alive. L'Achat Local was helping businesses get online, and we built a tool to help them onboard those businesses.
When COVID19 hit, businesses were forced to close their storefronts. The mandatory lockdown meant the end of the road for many brick & mortar businesses.
But consumers were still buying. Trapped in their homes, shoppers took to the internet and e-commerce was booming. Groupe Olix saw an opportunity and launched their project L'achat Local, an effort to help brick & mortar businesses start selling online.
They proved their concept using a no-code database to collect initial information from shop owners, and using Shopify to create the stores. This worked, but when they saw a surge in demand many of their manual processes became extremely cumbersome to keep up.
Two value-adding features in particular were requiring a lot of manual work to keep running: their vendor directory and vendor map.
They offered all businesses, without charge, an opportunity to get displayed on their map & listed in their business directory. This was a great promotional feature, but they spent hours adding everyone who filled out the form onto the map and into the directory.
We saved L'achat Local hours of manual work by automating their directory and their map. We migrated their database from their no-code tool onto a custom platform.
When new businesses signed up, we collected their business location & converted that information into a latitude / longitude. We built embeddable directories and maps, that L'achat Local embedded on their existing sites. New businesses would be added to the directories immediately after signing up.
L'achat Local has over 3,000 businesses in their directory. It would take 10-15 minutes per business to add them to the map and the directory, but this process was error-prone: the human who completed the process could easily make mistakes, causing the process to take even longer, and customers in the directory to get frustrated.
At 10-15 minutes per business, that is 500 - 750 hours of work, which is at least $7,500 - $11,250 (if the worker is working for $15/hour, and assuming no mistakes are made). All of that work, automated by a simple application that doesn't make errors.
Many owners of brick & mortar businesses are very low-tech. We had to make the process as simple as possible for them. That meant simple forms, without a lot of clutter.
We also implemented email sequences that would dispatch each step of the way. If a business got stuck, we would remind them that L'achat Local was there to help.
Owners were able to easily upload the products that they wanted to sell. L'achat Local would then take that data and launch Shopify stores for the owners. Later, when the owners were ready, L'achat Local would educate them on how to run their own shop.