Monday, July 10, 2017

Grassroots Digital Entrepreneurship: Neighborhood Rice & Cooking Gas – Online!

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We obviously have seen branded products and high-end items being sold online by large e-commerce providers in almost every part of the world that can support acceptable Internet speed. Here in the Philippines, we suffer from the two outstanding issues that hamper the otherwise explosive growth of e-commerce namely, acceptance of payment from both the buyer and the seller and the expensive cost of shipping. The thing is, online products can be lower compared to Mall or Store prices only if the delivery or shipping cost is kept to a minimum. By buying a product with a higher price value, translating to a bigger savings but having the weight or volume literally light or preferably less than 2 kilos, is the sweetest spot in e-commerce purchase for any buyer. An obvious example of this would be electronic gadgets, which can give a buyer as much as several thousands of pesos in savings while incurring only less than two hundred pesos in delivery cost.

Fabcorp is a new palengke partner of BigBenta.com. The company supplies Solane and Mgas LPG in Muntinlupa City. With this,  consumers no longer have to go their nearest LPG dealer but purchase this essential product online.
To give some context, these dealers are your ordinary merchants found in various wet markets in Metro Manila. We have encountered such entrepreneur in Pasig, the other in Paranaque and the most recent one was from Las Pinas wet market. All of them wanted to increase their sales and expand their market, but with the current product that they have, geographical presence and reach is quite limited.Cooking gas dealers decided to go digital and offer their product online? The catch is the dealer’s price doesn’t have huge savings for the customers, are very heavy such that if delivered by standard courier provider will be more expensive than the cost of the product itself and the customers are used to paying via cash-on-delivery (COD). An interesting discussion and problem solving exercise then comes to play.
 
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BigBenta.com CEO and Founder Charlie Fong. His vision is to help Filipino entrepreneus get online to grow their business.
To say the least, a customized approach was developed so that our dealers of rice and cooking gas could open their own online store through www.bigbenta.com, get confirmed transaction orders in selected areas, have their products delivered and collect their payment via COD. At the time of writing, I suspect that they could probably be the first online store of rice and cooking gas in the history of the e-commerce in the Philippines. Talk about taking digital entrepreneurship on the grass root level! BigBenta Marketplace is the only e-commerce platform in the Philippines that features free classified ads (buy and sell), online stores, and service bookings. Through these platforms, it aims to help the Filipino entrepreneur and MSMEs use the internet to grow their busines

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