Fairmart increases stores’ online traffic

Retailers can use Fairmart’s software to automatically digitise their inventory.

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Retail stores in Southeast Asia could have earned US US$4.5b more in sales if only consumers could find their products online. Now, these stores, whose operations are mainly physical, are at risk of losing another US$4.5b, should they fail to digitise their inventory, tech startup Fairmart said.

As an example Fairmart CEO and co-founder Jan Gasparic shared that he would often search online for new pet food or toy for his dog. But whilst there are three pet stores within the two kilometre radius from his home, his online searches lead him to marketplaces elsewhere, sometimes even overseas.

“I would look through the results and I’d see a lot of online listings. Then I would go into the map section and try to find which one of my local stores actually carries this product. But because the stores don’t digitise their inventory, they essentially just do not come up in the search results at all. Now, then I’ll keep on scrolling,” he said.

“The reason this problem exists is [that] current solutions are essentially made for e-commerce, and they’re a poor fit for the way physical retailers work,” Gasparic said.

He shared that physical retailers have a high number of stock-keeping units with some stores storing more than 2,000 items, making it difficult for retailers to manually digitise their products.

Putting local stores on the map