Yabatech Delivery founder, Edgar Odey is taking a bold step forward with the launch of Darsh Market. This innovative platform aims to create a seamless and accessible marketplace for students and entrepreneurs looking to sell their products online.
The last time we spoke, we talked about your journey into entrepreneurship and Yabatech Delivery. So could you tell us what you’re currently working on?
Over the years we’ve seen how the market has been for food delivery and it’s really great. But we have noticed that students love to sell things online and I mean most of our customers themselves.
They are also sellers. They sell one or two things like clothes, perfumes, deodorant, and other things. I’ve been thinking about it because I get frustrated to see them posting these on their statutes like 200 things sometimes I can’t even count them. This includes my aunty who sells clothes and this makes me angry.
Before now I started this line of business but it didn’t work, I think I mentioned it during our last conversation. So over the years, I’ve been able to see how the market has matured and how people will respond to this.
I have friends who still sell online since that time, the people I was trying to solve this problem for back then. So I’ve seen how the market has really evolved. I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes.
This time around, we are really going all in to be able to solve the problem for marketers and for students who are trying to sell things. And they are adopting it. The platform is live and the public launch will be this week by God’s grace.
What’s the name of this product and what new thing are you bringing into the market outside what other platforms are offering?
It’s called Darsh Market. It’s a marketplace. And the parent company of Yabatech Delivery is called Darsh. It’s a public marketplace, just like jiji.ng and the likes. Marketers will be able to come onboard and list their products to search for them online.
It’s going to rank on Google. They’ll be able to find them easily. We’ve started pushing out groups, especially group chat of students and people who sell online. And people have been asking very funny questions like, can I lease my apartment? I think he is an agent.
I never expected that someone would love to lease an apartment on the platform. After deliberating on it, I told him to go ahead and create an account. He has listed one apartment. So just imagine that kind of thing. So people are looking for this and you might think that there’s jiji.ng and why do people need to come to your site?
Yes, it is out there, but people want something that can actually work. Jiji is already crowded, I think. So if you give them a site where anybody can easily come and easily sell and people can easily find them. It’s something people jump upon. I’ve been seeing great responses from people as we’ve been telling them.
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How do you plan to achieve shipping of products since it’s a marketplace?
Basically, what the site does is that a user who is a seller can go there and list their products. They don’t need us because we don’t collect money from them. If a customer wants to buy, a customer can chat with them directly in the chat box, message them immediately and go back and forth with them.
So we don’t interfere in that because we want to make it a free marketplace. Anybody can come on board and sell. In the long run, our plan is that we’ll be able to partner with organizations that offer deliveries.
This is to help the buyers to deliver their products, and all they need to do is press a button to show them a pop-up or mention the location of the customer and everything. From there, the product will be sent out to the customer.
How do you plan to make money from the business to pay your team and manage the site?
That’s the question that has been coming up from my team and other people. So basically, the way we are prepared to make this is by advertisement from other brands that are related and then the sellers.
They can always promote their products to be seen by customers. We are going to rank those products. For instance, if you search for wristwatches. We are going to rank paid products higher to the buyers for them to buy from.
How do you plan to attract people that when they are searching for products online, your website will be seen on Google for them to come on the platform?
It’s called search engine optimization. And search engine optimization takes some time. It’s not automatic. It’s not something you wake up overnight and you say, you get ranked on Google. So it is something we are working on.
We know that these buyers really need their product to be out there, and we are going to be working on that. So instead of them sending a bunch of product images, they will just send them their store URL on Darsh Market.
Once they send the URL, that’s backlinks. Even if you send it on Instagram or Facebook, that’s automatic backlinks. And then it’d be way easier for their customers to find them.
So a customer can just go there, find all your products, and choose the one they want. Instead of you manually messaging them all the time, they can just add it to their Instagram profile for people to easily see their products.
How will the seller receive his pay or how will the buyer make payment to the platform or buy products on your platform?
We have to pay payment partners, a lot of them. But currently, since it is a free and open marketplace, we don’t accept payments on our own part. The seller and the buy will determine how they want to get paid and how they want to make payments.
We don’t determine that for them. However, as the platform grows, payments will be done on the platform. This means we’re going to provide a link. They can just create a payment link, they will enter the amount they want to pay and the seller will receive payments instantly.
So that makes it way easier for them. We have a lot of payment partners that we can always work with. Some of them have decided to work with us. But in the meantime, we are not going to collect payments for any one of them, either for the seller or for the customer.
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One of the goals of e-commerce platforms is to protect the buyer and the seller. How do you plan to protect the two parties from being defrauded?
I think a lot of Nigerians are now smart. We are not that foolish as Nigerians again. know that people can always scam us. Though we are going to have messages out there to tell these buyers that please be very careful. Make sure you receive your package before you make payment.
So even if you are going to pay 50% down than paying 100%. So I think most Nigerians, we are now smart enough to know that there are scammers out there. Most Nigerians are wiser than that now.
How do you plan to spread the word about your platform outside your network?
Some of the ways we plan to spread the news about the platform is to sponsor some newsletters that are out there. Also we will use Google ads. So there are always opportunities out there to be able to spread the word.
There are some seller communities that are out there. We can talk to the admins of these communities and tell them, this is what we are doing. We are providing this value and your community can get value from this platform we built. And then from there, we can build it over time.
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What are the measures you put in place to sieve bad sellers from the good sellers?
Over time, we’ll be able to weed out the bad from the good. But in the meantime, we are vetting them. We check the backend and are able to collect data from these people, and verify that they are selling what they truly claim to sell.
We don’t just allow anybody to come onto the marketplace and sell. But the truth is that in every marketplace, they are going to be bad eggs. We cannot fully root them out.
But over time, we’ll be able to vet those that are good and those that are bad. Also we are going to have a rating system, so that buyers can rate sellers.
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