Get Exposure in Your Community with the Shop Local Movement

Dev B. Kaushik

Shop Local, Buy Local! We toss these phrases around our world in today’s retail trend. When you are shopping locally or shopping small, you are supporting yourself.

But is it really important for the businesses? As per a local survey, independent businesses who participated in local shopping campaigns reported a revenue growth of around 9.2% which is nearly double of the increase of those who didn’t participated.  Highlight your business if you want to set yourself apart from the big box chain businesses.

Further supporting the communities creates jobs, increases salaries and also improves the well-being within the local community.  If you wish to gain exposure in the community, follow these tips and jump into the movement of shop local campaigns:

Gather resources: First, let the experts do the framework. With local shopping platform like Shopview.in, getting the right information is easy. This popular local shopping app will guide your properly to support your business.

Increase your visibility in community:  Join a local community and organizations dedicated to helping local businesses. They have good resources to focus in the markets in your local area. It will bring credibility to your business and increase the visibility of your business in your local marketplace.

Create a neighborhood team:  After joining hands with main street organizations, now it’s time to become your own community cheerleader. Be a shop local ambassador and advocate the shop local movement within your community. Create shop local signage for your business or shop and share it with all your neighbors.  Talk to your customers about the benefits of local shopping and project the feeling of the unification within the community. Don’t hesitate to say thanks to your customers when they shop local. Make your customers feel good on their choice to shop local.

Suggest all about this to other retailers as well within your area. If you all are together, it’s the beauty of being local. Buy Local, shop local and eat local.

Use social networks and Emails:  Now that you are only talking with your customers about the benefits of local shopping, remind them about the impact of shop local through social media, SMS and emails. Showcase your brand’s personality and make yourself or your business unique. Share a monthly or weekly fact to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest etc. with a shop local stat.  Don’t forget to use hash tags like #ShopLocal and #SupportLocal with your messages. Just as you thank your customers whenever they visit your shop, thank them virtually too. Educate your neighborhood shops and talk to your customers about the benefits of shopping local rather than shopping on the big chain stores.

So now you are aware of all these tips, it’s time to move out and spread the shop local love.  If you wish to support your business, register your business on shopview.in. We will do all the tedious work for you. Be it spreading the word about your business on social media or supporting the neighborhood.  Register yourself through shopview.in mobile app and add your products there. Customers will order the products through the app and you will get a notification about the order. Shopview will work further; we will even provide sales boys who will send orders to the doorstep of the customers. Payment will be either credited to your account or you will get it in cash after the product delivery.

Join shopview and give technological wings to your local business for free. 

Visit www.shopview.in for more details or contact at:

Email: info@shopview.in

Contact number: +91-8010885885

How Technological Changes and Adoption of Internet is Beneficial for Small Businesses?

Dev B. Kaushik

If you want to survive your business in today’s technological world we live in, it is must to keep yourself abreast with the changing trends. No matter what your business is, keeping pace with the technological trends can completely change it. The rise  of big E-commerce chains is simply killing the local businesses in India. Do you know why? This is because these e-commerce websites are using technology and internet. 

Big e-commerce brands are aggressively expanding their business and if local businesses will also make use of technology they too can compete with such brands. 

About 93 percent of Indian retail is still in with the local shopkeepers. E-commerce websites give people chance to book their products online and get them delivered at their doorstep. Customers just need to take out their smart phones from pocket to book any product and need not go anywhere physically. Many electronics stores and other local businesses are drowning their shutters due to the growing businesses of big brands offering products online. So, embracing technology has become imperative for small businesses. 

Going local makes sense

A retailer from Mumbai without any online business presence says,”Yes, online retailers are affecting our sales, but what we can do. Right now, things are sustainable, but if the future is internet/digital    then we will have to do something about it.”

Another retailer from Delhi tells us,”Yes, online sales have affected the market badly. I don’t know how they manage to sell products so cheap.” But did you know that out of top 20 retailers selling online have started primarily as brick and mortar retailers in the US?  We can learn a lesson from them. The Indian retail market is geared to scale up from $650 million to $1 trillion by 2020, a great opportunity for all the local and small businesses in retail sector. 

Technological empowerment for local businesses 

So are we late? Not really! Keeping pace with technological advancement and making an online presence, we can beat the world. A technological change can bring out many opportunities and advantages for small businesses. It will definitely boost consumer’s expectations.

Going local has become a new trend and a large number of consumers today prefer local marketplaces in their neighborhood area. Small businesses in India are now embracing advance technology to stand at par with the big brands.

How can you attract more customers to your local business?

Here is one of the suggested actions that local business might be interested to have a look at, in order to attract more customers.

Register yourself with the online platform like shopview.in. You might have heard about the popular online directories. Well, it’s good to get your business listed there but the problem is that these are big platforms where the big players are gambling. So you need to primarily focus on the places where your local businesses run prominently. Go for the shopview platform which is dedicated to support small businesses. It is a free platform where you can easily register your business, products and services to sell them quickly in your neighborhood. 

Making local businesses online with technological empowerment

Shopview.in offers a free app for small businesses. Simply register your store and see more sales coming your way from the local marketplace of your neighborhood. You need not be a tech savvy and the handling process is very simple. You can easily change the products and prices of your displayed products at shopview.in through your mobile or laptop. 

Shopkeepers can deliver products at the doorstep of the customers in the nearby area. The payment will be either given to them in cash or deposited in account as per their preferences. At Shopview.in, we will assist shopkeepers in all possible ways to upload products at Shopview.in and get more sales from local customers. We will also assist local business owners and service providers in delivering the products at the doorsteps of customers. 

Join shopview and give technological wings to your local business for free. 

Visit www.shopview.in for more details or contact at:

Email: sales@shopview.in

Contact number: +91-8010885885

Top Reasons to Shop Locally in Your Neighborhood Marketplace

Dev B. Kaushik  : 

Local businesses are what make our neighbourhood unique! It is always convenient to move to the chain stores, but next time you go out for shopping, consider shopping at your neighborhood store. Here are top 10 good reasons why you should make your next shopping trip at a local store:

Shop Local- Strengthen your local community:  Recent studies have shown that when you buy from independent, locally owned small businesses, over against a global chain store a considerable amount will stay in your own community which in turn helps to stimulate economy. Local businesses generate more than 3.5 times wealth rather than the national and international retailers.

Local Involvement: Small and local business owners are integral part of communities in which they live and work. Thus, they tend to be aware of how their decisions can impact their neighbours. They even sponsor local events and participate in charity events of the community.

Community Health: Local businesses tend to be people’s business. They build relationships with their customers and often know them by their names. Many small businesses band together and form casual or formal relationships with the merchant’s association. They offer better and more personal service. Local small businesses care about getting to know their customers.

Environmental Attributes: Shopping locally helps to reduce the impact and cost of packaging and transportation. This generally means contributing less to sprawl, habitat loss and pollution.

Create More Jobs: Local small businesses are the job creators and most of these are local jobs. Rather than moving to another city, employees can easily work closer to their homes. So supporting local businesses also supports the fellow community members who work with them.

Increasing the Tax Base: When we shop at local small businesses within the communities, the tax amount will stay within the local economy, thus helping to improve the community as a whole. Likewise, small businesses tend to buy locally and pump more of their profits back to the community compared to the multi-chain businesses.

Entrepreneurship: By shopping locally, you support the dream of others. Our country has long prided itself on the ability for anyone to open their own business.

Better Customer Service:  If you have ever dealt with chain shops or a large corporation, you know that getting help in some cases can be nightmare. You will have to call a toll-free number and then your call will be transferred to concerned person and it might be irritation. But when you shop local, the business owner is directly connected to everyone in the store which leads to a personal approach that often means that any problem that you have is taken seriously.

More Personalised Service:  Having the owner locally means that he knows the customers personally. He knows which products you buy or the services you request regularly and can tailor services to make your experience even better.

Product Diversity:  Local businesses sell products based on the needs of the community and not as the requirements of the world. That means products sold at small business will be tailored better to meet the expectations of clients.

Buying local is more beneficial and convenient. When you support local, you will get even better service. 

ShopView.in is committed to promote local businesses in the neighborhood so that shop owners could thrive in the local marketplaces. 

Team ShopView

How Local Shopping Makes Sense in Globally Connected Marketplaces

www.shopview.in

Dev B. Kaushik

  In the past few years, ‘Local’ has changed into a trendy buzzword, and for a good reason.

How often have you checked news magazines, Facebook, Twitter just to know about another world crisis? One more emergency? Yet another bailout plan for sick industries?

Don’t you start feeling powerless sometimes? Depressed? Overwhelmed?

It’s really tough not to feel like that way, when the difficulties are very massive….so distant… so critical...and unattainable…

But simply how much time and attention have you been giving to such discouraging and overwhelming global issues on which you have no control?
But why you are feeling powerless whenever you could take action in your own area, creating a difference, today?

Local shopping is the buzz today

If everyone did as "Think Globally, Act locally” quote suggested by the famous Paul McCartney.

Imagine if millions of people put the power which they are wasting currently, worrying all about the worldwide issues beyond their power and instead they start ‘being making the changes’ in their own communities.

We strongly believe that we’d end up creating such global change we are running after much faster and more sustainably in this way, because these solutions would give results from the bottom up side rather than the top down.

After fixing our cities and towns individually, we will collectively develop a more wealthy, pleasant and sustainable world.

In this digitally connected business landscapes of today, local marketplaces are focusing on empowering the shoppers, and factors like environment, economy and personal freedom have given boost to the trend. 

Empowering the local marketplaces

The word ‘Local’ is the connection of community and collaboration. Since they grew up in your community, a local business is more attached to our city/town rather than the multi city chain stores, and they are more likely to contribute to the non profits.

But unfortunately, that’s where there is disconnect. Although most of the customers claim that supporting local stores is important to them, but their wallets tell a different story.

 The chains, big box stores and online stores account for a huge share of the potential spending on their communities.  These big stores and business giants have managed to get an easy support for them and they do much of the marketing online and offline to stay at the top of the mind of consumers. They do take advantage of each and every loophole and the resources available, that’s why more and more people are doing shopping with big businesses.

Making the sense of local shopping

It has just created a disconnection between what the people truly value and wherever they spend their money.

Such negative feedback makes it really tough for local businesses to support their community as they lack the profits and earnings necessary to spend on the projects they need to fund. But this income is being siphoned out of the communities, unfortunately, with the assistance of the local shoppers.

But if such leaks could be plugged, more revenue would flow through the entire local community, kicked off by the booming local businesses in your area.

It’s our mission to support local businesses. How to make this happen? We have spent more than a decade in figuring out the solution. We have found two important keys to the success to support locals:

·         Set up regular reminders in the entire community to support Local

·         Provides shoppers with an online portal containing the complete local information

It will definitely help consumers to look locally first and it will increase the chances that they will find everything they need and provide the best ever experience that is as much convenient as possible.

It’s really amazing when people will act locally if you ensure that it is simple for them.

Want more information on how can you bring this revolutionary change and movement to your community?

Get in touch with us at www.shopview.in, we look forward to help you out.

Dev B. Kaushik