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B2B Distribution Marketplace

While in the UK and US consumer goods producers can concentrate on relationships with a handful of multi-national supermarket chains, the retail outlet base in Africa and emerging markets is fragmented (Large number of stores with orders that are frequent and small). Reaching these large numbers of small outlets is a difficult, expensive and costly business for consumer goods manufacturers operating in emerging and developing countries - Unilever, Nestle, GlaxoSmithKline, Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Heineken etc. Nigeria (Africa's largest consumer market) has over 1 million of these small shops, thus making it very expensive for consumer companies to reach small retail outlets. Solution developed by our team was aimed to deal with the following problems:

• Fragmented retail sector

• Large number of stores with orders that are frequent and small

• Large number of delivery points

• Cash collected on delivery

• Large sales force needed for such large customer base.

• Risk of financial loss for manufacturers - credit sales to distributors

Challenge

Creating a unique solution for the entire continent is a challenge by itself. The team had to get the deep understanding of global problems to solve, analyze a lot of data and held numerous meetings before we finally came to the development point.

As the system is robust and aimed to handle a lot of users' data, orders and financial transactions, our engineers had to create a properly designed back end architecture because any mistake on this stage would cost a lot.

Solution

Our engineers and UX specialists delivered an MVP solution and keep working on new features along with daily maintenance.

System proved itself as reliable and received positive feedback from both buyers and sellers. It definitely improved the way how market works and allowed both parties to reduce operational costs.

Outcome
  • Custom p2p ecommerce solution
  • Custom CMS
  • Responsive UI design
  • TDD approach used to ensure best quality
Scope
  • 3 engineers, a UI designer and a PM
  • QA team involved
  • Timeline: 3 months
Technology Stack
  • AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda)
  • Zend framework
  • MySQL
3rd Party Components & APIs
  • Remita API
  • Clickatell API
  • Zoho API