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Lokal
A platform that allows a small store owner to build his own online community and turn his LOKAL customers into loyal. It rewards everyday consumers and makes the entire process feel like a game.
Created on 28th March 2021
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Lokal
A platform that allows a small store owner to build his own online community and turn his LOKAL customers into loyal. It rewards everyday consumers and makes the entire process feel like a game.
The problem Lokal solves
Good businesses thrive on loyalty, especially small businesses.
- And we want to help this particular segment come online and thrive via their own online community.
The idea is to get the customers engage, and ultimately buy more (and more often) from the store owner.
- We are trying to make the process of buying from small shop owners much more interactive and rewarding via gamification and introducing concepts like seasons, membership levels, etc
- The customer gets to see a game, where levels are unlocked by buying more, and more often. As the levels progress, rewards go up. If he doesn't buy for some time, the concept which we are calling as season, their level reduces. They can choose to bypass levels by paying a token upfront.
Here's how Lokal helps all the stakeholders involved:
** Business Owner **
- Build an online presence with a community.
- Increased sales from customers at the cost of some profit percentage. (If the discount rates are set right, the business owner can make a profit).
** Customer **
- Get discounts for everyday shopping.
** Developer/Business **
- Make money from the store as an upfront fee.
- Offer monetary credit to high-paying customers (Concept of a credit card). Make money from interest.
- Take a cut from upfront payments for bypassing levels (gamification concept)
Challenges we ran into
- It was difficult to coordinate while being present in different cities.
- Creating a common backend server that gives everyone with the lastest API builds via ngrok was something new we tried.
- Integrating the FrontEnd and Backend turned out to be difficult that it would have been if it was on-campus.
- Our team has knowledge of different stacks (JavaScript vs Python). Ultimately JavaScript won and the poor Python people had to learn JavaScript. Similarly for SQL vs NoSQL.
- The schema was slightly tricky to get right and we spent a lot of time in struggling with it.
- Ideation was the most difficult stage and we had to spend a lot of time in deciding how to make it a positive sum game.
Discussion
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