Posted by We are all witnessing and experiencing the manifestation of digitization in India. It is amazing to see how small businesses, which is estimated to be around 50+ million are embracing technology. Please note it is just the beginning and technology will bring a lot of convenience and efficiency in our day to day life. We all live in a neighbourhood and we consume daily products and services from neighbourhood shops. Half of the services are subscription-based and the rest are on-demand services. To give an example Milk, Newspaper, water bottle, garden service, car wash, maids are all subscription-based services, while daily essential orders like dairy products, vegetables, fruits and pulses from Kirana or brick and mortar shops are all on-demand services. There are also regular maintenance jobs and on-demand repair services like plumbing, electrical and dhobi services.
It is very common for residents to stock up things for 15 days or 30 days, where they buy from wholesale or from malls most of the items. But for perishable items like dairy items, fruits and vegetables, they prefer to buy from local stores, which is top-up in nature. These are more of a phygital (Physical and Digital, online offerings) type where they trust on quality and quick home deliveries. Normally these are recurring small transactions, unlike shopping from organized retail, Or malls Or from e-Commerce online apps, which is once a week or twice a month.
Typically in urban clusters of residential areas, because of the paucity of time, it has become a habit to order over the phone, WhatsApp and get things delivered doorsteps. It is obvious that these residential communities need an easy way to discover such product & services and place the order online OR over chat. So demand curation and order curation becomes a necessity, where service provider wants to assess the demand and find an easy way to collect orders online. There are many applications and software services available in the market to cater to these needs.
Automated subscription billing software with the flexibility to account changes, pauses and check out are necessary to digitize and avoid all book and receipts based billing. Once digitized, no need to go door to door for giving bills and collecting cash. With post-COVID it has become a necessity to opt for digital payments than a short-lived change. Building digital storefronts make it easy for customers to discover vendors and place orders remotely at their convenience. It is quite possible people more and more people using chat services, which we call it as conversational commerce to become a new habit.
Once order is streamlined, next comes is managing order payments, collection efficiency. It always helps merchants in the neighbourhood to have healthy cash flow. Most of the subscription items with small ticket sizes will have post-paid billing like newspaper delivery, while medium to high like milk will have pre-paid billing to support working capital. Once ordering is digitized, it becomes easier to accept payments digitally and have a system to remind people to pay up on time. It is also common in neighbourhood commerce, where customers enjoy BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) flexibility given by merchants to regular customers. Khata book, Ledger software helps such transactions to keep accurate and transparent accounts with customers. So digital payments helps significantly with turnaround time and hence improve cash flow.
Zopnote is one such solution, which is customized for hyperlocal commerce services and provides all the above on one platform. Zopnote brings both customers, the demand side and merchants, the supply side on to one platform. It provides customer management, CRM, automated billing for subscriptions, order processing and simplified collection services all in one app. Customers get the convenience of finding services, tracking expenses and making payments at convenience.