by Ordering on Jun 30, 2022 3:08:39 PM
If you consider turning your online business into a hyperlocal marketplace, there is no better time for you than now. What started as a trend in 2020 is continuing to increase in popularity. The numbers show that the hyper-local on-demand delivery services will continue being on the rise for the years to follow.
As the term suggests, hyper-local marketplaces focus on a particular geographical area and the needs of the chosen customer niche. A D2C hyperlocal marketplace means delivering offline products and services through an online platform.
Time is of the essence.
Society is slowly shifting from filling up their schedules to the maximum and prefers saving time on everyday tasks to spend quality time with family and friends. As a result, people love to take advantage of emerging technologies to simplify their daily life to save valuable time, for example, by ordering groceries, laundry services, or cleaning.
Paying for those services was considered an unnecessary luxury a few years ago. However, nowadays, on-demand services and products are considered a wise investment for both customers and business owners.
Closer relationships with customers
As a business owner, following a hyper-local marketplace model allows you to understand your target market and their needs. Since you are focused on a specific local area, you have greater access to your customer's pains and gain creators throughout the whole sales funnel and long after the initial purchase.
For example, a hyperlocal on-demand food delivery service would better understand delivery disturbances in specific neighborhoods of the city. It could adjust its driver management system accordingly to exceed competitors.
Getting to know the needs and wants of your customers locally, allows your marketplace to improve along with the feedback you receive from your niche gradually.
On the other hand, accommodating customers from multiple locations can be very difficult, since the perceived value of your product or service, may vary drastically, depending on the place.
Low risk and gradual expansion
Going with the hyperlocal model gives a greater possibility for testing ideas and features of your website or application. As a business owner just starting, you want to lower your risk to the minimum.
Creating a D2C hyperlocal marketplace lets you test your idea on a smaller population and then improve your features further after analyzing data and reviews.
Providing local vendors with a high-tech solution
Having an omnichannel platform, designed to understand the local market's needs, will be a very appealing solution for local businesses such as small restaurants or local boutiques. Since they might not want to start their platform just yet, but still want to make an online appearance, to test out how online selling works.
As an owner of a hyperlocal marketplace, you can create much value by providing a seamless platform that is easy to operate, offers detailed data on customers from the local area as well as give your vendors access to high quality, high-tech order management system, which will improve their quality control and inventory management.
Being a part of an omnichannel D2C platform can, for example, allow small local businesses to explore other areas of the city where they operate and expose them to a new scope of potential customers, which would not be possible solely through in-store sales.
Access to customer data
A hyperlocal marketplace platform gives access to spending patterns and your customers' details within the same source. Access to this information allows for more accurate data analysis and lets you dive deeper into what types of products and services are the most desirable in a specific location.
Improved customer service
As mentioned above, heading access to more detailed customer data allows for improved customer service and direct contact with the buyers.
For example, having an online marketplace allows for implementing specific payment methods that are preferable among the local customer niche or implementing unique campaigns or social media integration such as just ordering through WhatsApp, which works perfectly on a regional scale.
Also, in case of complaints or disturbances during the ordering and delivery process, it is a lot easier and faster to get to the root cause of an issue in a hyperlocal marketplace instead of large platforms that offer very standardized customer service solutions.
Are you ready to give your idea a go?
The trend of the D2C hyperlocal marketplace is not going anywhere, and now is the perfect time to test it out! If you have an idea for a D2C hyperlocal online marketplace, grocery shopping, food delivery, or other products but are not very tech-savvy; check out an excellent software provider like Ordering, which offers a free trial and can get your business up and running in less than a week without any coding skills.
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