By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

An online delivery provider is set to launch an e-commerce platform just in time for the upcoming Christmas season.

Granville Collie, managing director of MUTRU, told Tribune Business this e-commerce platform will have all of the “hot ticket” items that people order on a regular basis and it will be “strictly for local products”.

Mr Collie said: “We will have products from multiple stores and retailers from around the country. Let’s say a customer orders a Nike shirt, we will have that available from five different stores and you choose from what is available or within your price range and we will deliver it for you.”

The idea of an e-commerce platform came about during the pandemic where MUTRU realised that a lot of the partner retail stores didn’t have an e-commerce platform or even a website, which made customers ordering a difficulty in addition to collecting payment on behalf of the retailers problematic.

“The time the customer makes a sale on our website, our technology would then pass that on to whatever retailer we have at the lowest price,” Mr Collie said.

This new e-commerce platform will allow customers to be able to order their goods, have them paid for and delivered to them in just a few short clicks. All in all, this cost about $5,000 to put together and will be ready within the next two months.

Mr Collie added: “With our original delivery app model, we were depending on retailers to have a website, but with our new website we will launch the 1,000 most popular items and it can be from any retailer that signs up with us. It will be from grocery, to liquors and beauty supplies are included as well.

This is “pretty much” like Amazon and follows the Amazon model, however, MUTRU will not have fulfilment centres and everything will have to be available on sale if the vendor/retailer has it in stock.

Mr Collie also said: “If we could start off to the point where as we fulfill in the highest demand products, and as demand increases, then we look at offering more niche products as well as even working along with other retailers and store and house more of their products. This all depends on the response from the market.”

A positive market response is all that MUTRU needs to invest more in this new innovation in the Bahamian retail market.

“We just want to nail this down before we start to invite more retail stores to come on board,” Mr Collie said.