Merkaatoo aspires to be the online mirror image of the largest open-air market in Africa, Mercato, which is located in Addis Ababa.
Very recently, many small shops in Mercato have been closed due to a government policy, and many merchants are showing great interest in bringing their business online by posting on TikTok and Telegram. And due to various causes, the price of goods is getting higher and higher in Ethiopia.
I want to take this opportunity to launch a small commodity market place where items are sourced directly from factories or with a minimum middle person for the lowest price to the consumer.
Currently, Ethiopian merchants who import small commodities from China collect up to a 60% return from a $5000 investment, and the very active small commodity importers go to China a few times per month. The marketing channels used by these merchants are their business connections and social media.
Merkaatoo will incorporate an affiliate network through individuals who can go live on TikTok and advertise the platform.
I have already collected more than 7,000 (and counting) commodities from shops found in Yiwu. I will integrate a state-of-the-art search and recommendation system on the catalog for local languages.
To deploy the Merkaatoo platform, I mainly will use Google Cloud products and services such as BigTable, (to store the catalogs and click streams and Google Analytics data), BigQuery and Friends (for the personalized recommendation system), Vertex AI for searching, and Cloud Run Cloud Run for hosting the microservices.
It has been a little more than one month since I started testing my idea on my local computer using Apache Nutch, Apache Solr, ScyllaDB, Apache Spark, Apache OpenNLP, and go-safeweb,