Shoplocal Brings The Best Of Both Online And Offline Shopping Experiences Together For Its Customers

Friyana Munshi

Pune, 29 March 2021: Buyers often find themselves stuck between online and offline buying when it comes to purchasing footwear and apparels. For them, e-commerce platforms are far from offering a great and satisfying shopping experience when size, material, colour, and so many other factors are considered. Offline shopping is also not a wholesome experience when you have to tiringly search multiple stores to pick the product of your choice.

Launched in October 2020, Shoplocal is solving the problem by merging both online and offline commerce.

It is a Pinterest-like platform for local commerce where local customers and offline retailers interact, via images, for the purpose of buying and selling. It invites customers to upload images of the products they want and check availability in their local market. Nearby retailers see the images and directly respond to the customers by sharing pictures of the designs available with them. The customer can then contact the retailer through the in-app chat for more inquiries, book the product on the platform and pick it up at the store.

“We are solving the problem for both offline buyers and retailers,” said Tausif Alam, Co-founder and CEO at Shoplocal.

He added that an image-focused platform solves the problem of product discovery for fashion-conscious buyers. Simultaneously, the photos put up by buyers will also help offline retailers in inventory selection, by generating product recommendations based on fashion consumption patterns.

The platform allows offline retailers to post pictures and videos of their products as well, which will appear on the home screen of local buyers and thereby increase their visibility. These posts will appear as auto-suggestions to local buyers posting or interacting with similar images, thereby customising the search of each buyer.

The platform boasts of high growth. It says that it has been able to garner over 20,000 downloads in such a short span of time. It claims to have over 15,000 registered stores from footwear and apparel categories. The platform currently focuses majorly on Maharashtra.

Alam says that the platform has been in talks with investors and will soon raise funds to expedite the expansion process in different cities in the country.

Download Shoplocal App through this link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.obuv.walkinc