The 10 Most Recommended Retail Solution Providers in 2019 [ Business Magazine ]

Empowering Small Businesses with Technology
Shopping or Retail Therapy as
some would like to call it is very
dynamic and trends change with
the customer, country, economic
conditions, technology and more. But
there’s no denying that the Retail
industry is indispensable and a big
contributor to a country’s growth. The
last few years have seen Indian retail
space change significantly with
affordable internet, smartphones and
arrival of online shopping. While the
bigger market players have embraced
the changes, the smaller peers are yet
to change and adapt.
Fixing Small Business’ Big Problem
The technological empowered change
in consumer buying behaviour has left
the micro, small and local businesses
in a fix as they are finding it difficult to
compete with big retailers and are
losing footfall and a repeat business.
Lomoso Solutions Pvt Ltd,
Ahmedabad, is a technology startup
empowering these businesses with
affordable and AI enabled technology
for customer engagement. The local
businesses have a huge market share
but are lagging due to poor customer
engagement outside their business
premises. Lomoso came-up with an
affordable technology solution
Walkins –an AI based, easy to use,
low cost, integrated, data analytics
based customer engagement platform
available on mobile and web.
Lomoso’s Walkins is a brainchild of
Gaurav Sutaria and Taral Shah,
Co-founders and childhood friends
sharing enthusiasm, risk-taking
capacity and passion to help society
and complimenting each other’s
capabilities. Gaurav’s stronghold is
sales and marketing and Taral chips-in
with his expertise in cloud computing
and is an AWS certified system
architect.
Of Hits and Misses
The story of Walkins starts with the
problem of sales in the local business.
The first solution introduced was
OneHop but its market fitment or
acceptance was not as per mark and
was scrapped. Team Lomoso then
leaned down on operations, took no
salaries for months and with high
resilience and conviction, kept
building, motivating everyone,
aligning everyone with company’s goal
and vision, continuously staying in
touch with customers, taking feedback
and making a product and business
roadmap more specific, measurable,
and attainable.
The resultant was Walkins, a powerful
technology platform which provides
various customer engagement tools to
small businesses, simplifies all the
tools and techniques using integrated
technology and helps them connect to
their store walk-ins. It also collects
their store’s data, digitizes and
organizes them and stores it on a
centralized location for reuse. The
beauty is the ePage, a dynamic micro
website with built in SEO and browserbased
notification and a customized
loyalty program, which helps
businesses to reward their customers
on each trade and encourage them for
the repeat visit to their store at the right
moment.
The Industrial Temperament
There is a big opportunity in India for
Retail solutions as shown by statistics
which says there are thirty small and
micro businesses and eleven retailers
amongst thousand citizens. Being
meticulous, Lomoso surveyed the
market to find out the current
challenges and how Walkins can solve
them. They found that small businesses
do not gather store visitor’s
information; have digitized customer
data; use digital medium; adapt to
technology and use business insight.
To solve these issues, the Walkins
platform provides - easy to use, and
affordable solution; collection,
digitization, organization and storage
of store visitor’s info, at a centralized
location; meaningful communication
on customer’s preferred medium;
Business intelligence, providing insight
into business to make future decisions.
Embracing Technology and
Recognition
The company believes in having a
hyper-scalable technology architecture
which is able to meet the changing
requirements and allows plug and play
40 FEBRUARY 2019