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Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeNewsByo Consortium Nears E-Vending Platform Roll-Out

Byo Consortium Nears E-Vending Platform Roll-Out

A consortium of traders from the country’ second largest city-Bulawayo have developed an electronic-vending platform expected to create a wider market place for small food producers and retailers amid a biting lockdown for most informal traders, 263Chat Business has learnt.

The grouping- Sizimele Consortium has been working on this project since last year with the collaboration of the Zimbabwe Resilience Building Fund as part of efforts to keep informal traders connected to wider markets during times of business disruptions such as the COVID-19 induced lockdown.

“What we have done is that we have the first draft or the first trial of the application, we had a discussion last week with developers to highlight some of the stuff we feel needed to be incorporated onto the platform. So we gave them our feedback in terms of our comments so we have the first draft now that we have been testing,” Bulawayo Vendors and Traders Association (BVTA) executive director, Mike Ndiweni told this publication in an interview.

“Any time from now as soon as we get feedback from the developers in terms of taking on board our comments then we should be good to go then we start the pilot trial with traders,” he added.

The electronic platform will incorporate producers of food such as farmers from all over the country and connect them with retailers.

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The e-vending platform has several advantages to producers of food items who are often shortchanged by middlemen in terms of pricing.

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With a virtual market, price discovery is market driven hence preserving profits for producers to sustain production.

Recent disruptions to business such as the January 2019 shutdown and the COVID-19 lockdowns have prompted the need for the country’s pre-dominantly informal economy to rethink ways of doing businesses by making use of electronic alternatives.

Studies show that marketplace apps and websites are expected to account for more than 60 percent of digital commerce by 2023, partly because they provide a steady stream of consumer traffic for retailers while also supporting the credibility of their products or services.

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