Needs

Customer App

Industry

Social Commerce

Client

Timeline

May 2021 - July 2021

ABOUT SHOPPA

Geoffrey See's vision for Shoppa (YCW22) is to make daily necessities accessible to millions of Vietnamese living in smaller cities and towns. By empowering female micro-entrepreneurs in underserved areas of Vietnam, Shoppa has made it possible to put a digital supermarket in their community, providing a variety of food, fresh produce, and household items at competitive prices.

With over 80% of the country's population living outside Vietnam's two largest cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, many smaller towns lack a supermarket, making it difficult for rural residents to access essential household items. Traveling long distances to purchase these items can be time-consuming and expensive, limiting economic opportunities for small business owners and rural residents in general.

Shoppa bridges this gap by giving microentrepreneurs - mostly women influential in their community - access to high-quality, affordable products that they can sell to their peers. This not only improves the quality of life for rural residents, but it also helps to boost economic growth by supporting small businesses and creating jobs in underserved areas of Vietnam.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Shoppa's approach to retail allows micro-entrepreneurs in underserved areas of Vietnam to sell a wider selection of products online with minimal investment and without the burden of inventory risk.

While traditional mom-and-pop shops can cost upwards of US$25,000 to set up, Shoppa's Chi Shoppas, "Sister Shoppas" in Vietnamese, can get started with just US$25 in working capital. To facilitate their sales, Shoppa developed a system that allows their Sister Shoppas to browse inventory, apply markups, and share curated shopping lists with their community.

Initially, Shoppa relied on messaging apps like Whatsapp and Zalo to communicate with their customers and process orders. Geoffrey would send price lists to his customers. His customers would indicate which products they were interested in and Geoffrey would send back links to Shoppa's website which was hosted on Shopify, a popular e-commerce platform. Customers could then share these links (which contained pictures and additional information) with their friends.

While useful for validating demand and getting feedback from customers, the amount of manual work required to process each order meant that Geoffrey and his team could only fulfill orders from tens of customers each day.

However, with their business doubling every month, it became clear that Shoppa needed a scalable solution to keep up with customer demand.

BUILDING AN ONLINE STORE FOR SCALE

To address this issue, Shoppa turned to Afi Labs to build their very own online store. By doing so, they could streamline the ordering process and minimize manual work, allowing them to scale their business more efficiently.

1.

A wide selection of products

The store needed to have a wide variety of products, such as milk powder, fresh fruit, vegetables, dry goods for sale. Many of Shoppa's users complained about the small number of products carried by rural supermarkets and grocery stores.

2.

Social-first e-commerce

Users wanted a way to share links to products with their friends so that they could coordinate group buys.

3.

Automated payment settlements and revenue sharing

Instead of manually calculating commission rates and settling invoices using manual bank transfers (a very tedious process that took Shoppa several hours each day), Shoppa wanted this done automatically to save time and improve the user experience.

4.

Transparency via customer notifications

Users wanted to be notified when purchased items were prepared for shipping, out for delivery and received by the end customer.

DEVELOPING A CROSS-PLATFORM MOBILE APP WITH REACT NATIVE

Vietnam boasts a high rate of smartphone adoption, with 73.5% of the population owning one. Given this, it was evident that the online store should have a mobile-first design right from the outset.

To save on costs and development time, we decided to develop a React Native app that could be deployed on both iOS and Android platforms using a single code base. This strategy also meant that any frontend engineer with a background in Javascript could maintain the app.

Along with developing the mobile app, our team created essential internal tools to support the online store, including a simple backend using Ruby on Rails. This enabled Shoppa's operations team to update and manage product details quickly, upload spreadsheets with product information, and manage inventory, custom pricing, and order processing.

The Shoppa mobile app and backend took about 3 months to build from start to finish and was well received by Shoppa's customers.

With their new online store in place, Shoppa was able to continue their impressive growth trajectory and provide even more Vietnamese communities with access to essential goods.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SHOPPA

"My dad was a hawker who sold drinks in a food center in Singapore. I’d like to think that Shoppa’s work helps micro-entrepreneurs like him," Geoffrey explains. “We hope we continue to serve people in cities and towns outside of the largest cities through Shoppa’s digital supermarkets run by the community for their community.”

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