This is freethegreenmonster.com (FTGM), a website that helps small to medium sized brick and mortar retailers to create an online commerce presence, with their own commerce enabled mini website in a few simple steps.
Bandwidth Blog chatted to co-founder Richard Lemkus about the motivation behind this innovative concept, the challenges involved and the state of the online retail space in South Africa.
1. What was the motivation behind freethegreenmonster.com?
We saw the real world, not online, retail space as divided like a pyramid into a few large retailers, a selection of medium sized businesses and then at the bottom of that pyramid there is a whole host of small businesses and people that are just starting brands or just finding something to sell and earning a little bit of money. So, the kind of people that have stalls at the multiple marketplaces you see popping up around Joburg and Cape Town.
We saw that the large corporates and the more innovative medium sized businesses were gearing themselves up for the inevitable wave that is the online revolution (watching The States take to retail online) but the cost of web development along with the costs of actually then trying to market that website and the complexities surrounding taking your business online; web maintenance, trying to figure out what SEO stood for and trying to market their products online, we felt would prove to be prohibitive to these literally thousands of smaller retailers.
2. What is your goal in terms of providing for these small businesses?
Our goal was to build the most simple web tool that would allow a small business to sign up and get selling. They have full control of their web stores, they decide where they can deliver to, how many of each product they want to sell and through which mediums they would like to take money. We have offered EFT and PayPal as the only options for now and we have hopefully designed the system to really be an easy step-by-step process and are seeing some great responses from the small retailers that are on the site at the moment.
3. Can you explain how you came up with freethegreenmonster.com?
The online market place is only the first step in our business plan. We also want to offer a loyalty scheme to these businesses based on purchasing and green metrics. So the name is a play on freeing your business (i.e. making more money) and eventually being able to differentiate yourself on the site by performing more sustainably as a business.
4. What is involved in the set up process for members?
Businesses we approach are really keen on the idea of FTGM given the fact that it only costs R100 per month, we take no transaction fees and it only takes about 20 minutes to set up a stall and about 5-9 minutes per product loaded. A monster site can be used as a primary website or a webtool to drive more traffic to a business’s existing website.
5. What is your background that lead you to FTGM?
There are three of us. Two were in property, project management and the third worked in The States for a large corporation so this is our first time starting a business together. One of us learned to web design and we hired a brilliant developer in the Ukraine who codes everything for us.
6. Where did you first find the businesses to register on the site?
We have been going to markets and talking to personal connections. We have only been going for a month so lots of cold calling and introducing ourselves and our concept to people is involved. We have small followings on Facebook and Twitter already so we are finding that businesses are starting to find us albeit slowly. It’s all about creating that tipping point for us. We need to drive great businesses and products to the site which in turn will help our traffic count and make it more attractive for businesses to sign up to the site.
7. Do you have specific criteria for businesses wanting to sell their products on the site?
We have not set criteria as we want this to be a place where the customer can come and have a browsing experience as they would in a shopping mall or a marketplace. We have a fairly sophisticated directory system which allows members to browse through categories and sub categories. Each business then has its own purchase rating system which will enable them to build up a good reputation for being a trusted seller.
8. What differentiates you from those you see as your competitors?
We also strongly believe that the marketplace is where a business should be. Places like BidorBuy, freethegreenmonster and Etsy are the way of the future – having a bespoke built website is like having a store in the middle of the Karoo. We feel that FTGM differentiates itself from the likes of Bidorbuy by allowing businesses to create a branding experience having the ability for members to track them and receive weekly updates on everything they do, as well as offer flat rate shipping on their entire product offering and create coupons to get customers into their online and brick and mortar stores.
9. What where the challenges involved in setting up the site?
Obviously, as none of us know how to code, having to liaise with a web developer in the Ukraine has been tough, to say the least. Web developing is such a hard thing to define time wise as you encounter hurdles and complications along the way so there were definitely dark times not knowing when you will have a product that is robust enough to take into the live environment.
10. Any future developments you can reveal?
We are launching in the United States in about three weeks and then we will be looking to move into as many countries as possible allowing for businesses to choose to deliver outside of their country and allow customers to search not only their own city, province and country marketplaces but also other countries’ marketplaces as well. Imagine being able to go shopping in the Ukraine from the comfort of your own home. Is it not an amazing world we live in!
We also do have a next step in development looking to ‘capture’ users into the system which is the loyalty tool I talked about earlier. The concept is fully thought out and we just need to build up a solid business and user eco-system before we can progress onto this but we believe if we can reach this milestone we will be around for a long time to come.
11. What is your ultimate goal for FTGM?
Our ultimate goal is to empower small businesses to allow them an accessible affordable space where they can explore the potential of the online environment for their business and products.
If you have any questions about freethegreenmonster.com post them in the comments below.
