Corporate and big brands are ruling all over the world. Even this pandemic is not able to stop them from upscaling. Technology and human power have made them robust and evolving. Local merchants do not have the upgraded technical knowledge, nor do they have a financial backup, due to which their sales are limited.
This pandemic again focused our attention on the problem of the local merchants who are forced to close the doors of their earnings.
Vedam Prasanna completed her Bachelor in Commerce, and Prabhala Sri Adi Lakshmi Kameswari completed her Master in Chemistry. Despite coming from an ordinary educational background, they still hold the power to transform the world with their vision.
Prasanna and Lakshmi are sisters-in-law and both belong to Telangana and Andhra Pradesh local markets, and this gave them the advantage of understanding the core problems of locals. These two inspiring women analyzed the sufferings and pain points of local merchants.
After a lot of trials, they identified that the local merchants need digitalization, and they decided to bridge the gap between local merchants and digitalization. The continuous brainstorming sessions gave rise to Local Merchants Offers.
Local merchants are getting huge competition from big corporations, and this disadvantage gave rise to the LMO in January 2020, with the only focus being to strengthen local merchants by providing the right set of resources and advanced technical support.
“LMO is an online store for local merchants. The application digitalizes the local shops and provides an online store supported by high-tech features and the latest technology”, Prassana Explains.
LMO is India’s first application that is designed for local merchants. It is made using advanced technologies that will help LMOs onboard online merchants and customers.
Different from other platforms, LMO offers more than 160 categories of listed businesses, from restaurants to electronic items and from arts and crafts to rental cars.
LMO provides some special features for service-based merchants, like appointment bookings. It breaks the cliche way of calling and provides a digital solution to book appointments.
The best part of this feature is that users can choose appointment timings at their convenience, which is very rare in other service providers.
The companies know that their targeted audience is locals, and hence the user interface is made in eight different local languages. By July 15th, they will introduce three popular languages in India to support every section of society.
Getting started with LMO is very easy for merchants. A user can sign up while answering a few questions. After a successful sign-up, they need to verify their shop along with some necessary documents.
To submit the products, merchants can either submit the images of their items or they can easily select images from the inbuilt inventory. LMO has an in-built inventory with 14,000+ images that cover the majority of the businesses.
For a better onboarding experience, it also offers customer support. Merchants can directly call a given helpline number and describe their products and services; the rest of everything will be done by the team.
Merchants can also give various offers to attract customers: flash sales, discounts, and cashbacks.
“More quantities, more offers.”
“Initially, before the release, we were planning to charge a 4% commission from the merchants. But when we realized the fact that this pandemic affects most of the merchants very severely, we changed our initial plan and started LMO with 0% commission”, Lakshmi says.
LMO went live on March 28th in both Andhra and Telangana, targeting 2000+ areas. The company was hit by the pandemic in its initial stages, and getting the resources and the right team became the key challenge for the founders.
However, the desire to support locals was so determined that the company managed to onboard 450+ merchants in just 50 days. Another challenge for the founders was to command the company on a defined budget and that too from their own pockets but the powerful ladies managed everything so well that the company continuously saw growth from the day it started.
Globally”Currently, we are targeting only Telangana and Andhra Pradesh because of the market familiarity. But our mission is to reach the entire India, and for this, by July 15th, we will launch LMO in the entire PAN India local market” Lakshmi Explains when asked about their future goals.
She further added, “They will cover Tier 1, 2, 3, and 4 cities of PAN India and release in at least one area of each district”.
The pandemic is tough for both the company and its employees, especially when you are just starting. However, our team is continuously determined to achieve the goals we are targeting, which results in a successful product launch.
The success of the company is not the sole result of the efforts of the founders. There is a dedicated team of hardworking employees who work behind the scenes to achieve this success.
Pragathi Attluri is the bridge between the technology of LMO and local merchants, which helped local merchants understand and learn how to bring their businesses online.
Her prior experience in management helped LMO into the Andhra and Telangana markets, and her creative strategy resulted in bringing 400+ merchants in the first 50 days only.
Noel Sasikanth, a technology enthusiast, helped LMO become a more advanced online platform for local merchants. He plays a key role in the design, development, and functionality of LMOs.
His dynamic nature helped him adopt new technologies and overcome challenges faced during the initial days of development.
Priyanka Jain is the creative pillar of the company. Her work in LMO is hard to describe in mere words. Her work is focused on creating brand images for the company. She also maintains the online presence of LMO, which is a key factor in today’s era.
If you want to know more about our business and share the same vision as ours, then we are delighted to meet you.
We are open to partnership opportunities through any means of support. To help us digitize local markets against big corporate giants, you can reach out to us at business@yourlmo.com.
Let’s together empower the local market with the latest technology and strengthen it against the competition from corporate giants and global online marketing.
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