Hi all, I'm building a platform where customers can find stock availability and search for products within a radius. I have a plugin that connects to their point of sale and can read their stock quantities and pass them orders. Can I get feedback from this group on how to incentivize stores to use my platform and my plug-in? It's ad-free and my objective is to bring back the several small businesses that got wiped out with covid19. Any ideas on what their objections may be, what they may need, what they will find useful, etc?
Hello @veenanair thanks for your post. It certainly is very challenging trying to launch a new product and break into an industry. Do you make other plugins or other items for small businesses? Some reluctance could be attributed to an overall unfamiliarity with you/your company. To develop trust in using your products, you'll need to education your customers as to why they should trust and do business with your company. Especially if you're selling something electronic that plugs into something I already own. I really need to trust your company/product to risk something like that; I'm sure there are no bad intentions, but with the prevalence of hacking everyone needs to be especially careful, so please take that into account when you're discussing your product with customers.
I don't know much about you or your product, but just with your description it sounds a lot like something called Pointy that is used by Google to do what your product does; show people where they can purchase a product in their local area. Make sure you know your competition, and what their selling points are, because you'll need to talk to potential business partners about why your product may be better than the competition.
Good luck to you, I wish you the best and thank you for your dedication to helping small businesses. They did take a hit during the difficult time over Covid, and in general Small Businesses are often struggling to compete with larger companies.
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