HYPERLOCAL E-COMMERCE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

HYPERLOCAL E-COMMERCE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS The good news is, there are already many e-commerce platforms that are helping small business owners (SBOs) sell their products online, such as Amazon, Lazada, Shopee and Carousel. The bad news is it is still difficult for the smaller and poorer SBOs to join those platforms, because of prohibitive entry fees and punitive commission rates. Of course, it’s a free market out there, and the smaller and poorer SBOs are free to decide whether they will join the bigger online platforms or not, but they do not have much of a choice, because of affordability issues. Aside from that, the steep commission rates of the bigger platforms are not sustainable for them, because their margins are already very low. My solution to this problem is to create local e-commerce platforms that would be funded and subsidized by the Local Government Units (LGUs), so that the local SBOs, big or small, could easily sell their products online, meaning that they don’t have to pay prohibitive entry fees, and they need not pay for very high sales commissions either. I am calling it hyperlocal, because we could geotag the platform so that only local sellers could sell to local buyers. If any LGU is interested, my development team has already created the template for the platform, and we could now customize it for any Mayor or Governor who is interested. IKE SENERES/05-28-2024