“Nearby” is an online storefront that handles marketing, orders, fulfillment, and shipping for local businesses so that they can compete with online retail giants.
What We Know:
- The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on small businesses. In contrast, retail giants like Amazon, Target, and Walmart have seen an average of 39% more in profit during Covid than in the previous year. According to the business review site, Yelp, over 160,000 businesses have closed since the pandemic began.
- The company’s founder, April Underwood, first ran the program with a website called “Keep Oakland Alive,” which features 40 small businesses. Now, she is expanding “Nearby” to major cities across the U.S., with Austin and Charleston coming up next.
- Underwood is using her experience leading product design at tech giants like Slack and Twitter to create a program that can efficiently boost small businesses’ sales. “There is no website or app you can go to and buy things from the shops in your own local hometown, and get them delivered to your doorstep just like you might from Amazon or some big e-commerce player. And that’s what we’re building,” Underwood told NBC News.
- She describes how her platform works, stating “Nearby” provides people to make the deliveries, content writers to craft an online presence and digital marketers who can find paying customers online. Additionally, the website/app allows businesses to keep a digitized inventory, something Underwood says was missing in online “buy local” efforts of the past.
- Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData’s retail division, explains that small businesses are currently suffering due to people only frequenting a few stores in order to avoid contracting or spreading the virus. “However, it is not all bad news, as there has been a resurgence in consumers wanting to shop local — which suggests that smaller stores could do better once the virus is under control and things start to normalize,” Saunders said in an email to NBC News.
- Co-owner of co-owner of Oaktown Spice Shop, Erica Perez, says she feared that she would have to completely shut down her shop at the start of the pandemic. However, after collaborating with Nearby for just a fee of 5 percent, she was able to expand her business online.“I think that the world has changed forever, and we are going to be selling things online to a greater degree than we ever have before. And we’re learning how to do that. We certainly aren’t set up here to be a fulfillment center out of a retail shop.” said Perez.
When discussing the meaning behind shopping local, Underwood describes it as “frankly, the smallest but most pragmatic way that you can be an active participant in your community.”
