By Naomi Parris
DESPITE COVID-19 causing some amount of fear across Guyana, many young creatives have used their time at home, during the partial lockdown, to birth innovative and unique business ideas.

However, given the COVID-19 protocols, many entrepreneurs who are new to the business world have found it difficult to market their business safely, while meeting their customers’ demands during the pandemic.

Cognisant of this, a computer science student and an administrative assistant teamed up to create the Guyanese version of the Amazon website, which provides a local online market for entrepreneurs to promote their businesses and consumers to purchase various items from the safety of their homes.

The duo, 29-year-old Jay Carter and 21-year-old Malika Allicock designed and recently launched their online market place website called “Bringgy”.
During an interview with Guyana Chronicle, Allicock, one of the creators of the website noted that the initiative gives way for business owners to build their online presence and make their products accessible to consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Bringgy is an online delivery and market place that basically allows sellers to list their items on the website and customers can shop for them wherever they are. What that basically means is that the customers can create an account and shop from the sellers’ store front,” she explained.

The young woman added that the website also relieves entrepreneurs of having to carry the weight of building and managing an online website.
“Having a store front is like having your own personal website; however, you don’t have to worry about the additional work that you have to put in to manage your own website so Bringgy is a much accessible and easy version of that,” he said.

Allicock disclosed that herself and Carter reached out to a few small businesses which were reeling for an opportunity to have an online platform like theirs to advance their businesses into digital marketing.

“We reached out to small businesses… so we saw businesses were popping up on Instagram and Facebook through adds and when you visit most of the pages they don’t have a website or they don’t have a link to their website so what we did we reached out to them and said hey what are the challenges you are facing during this COVID-19 time,” she said.

TIME SOLUTION
Meanwhile, the technological brain behind the website, Jay Carter said, “During the whole COVID-19 pandemic, you know a lot of small businesses they were now basically looking at a way to take their businesses virtual [and] have an online presence or in some cases even boost their online presence.”

He noted that many of the business owners who they have interacted with were not up-to-date with the technical details of building an online platform and website; however, after seeing the need for such a platform, he decided to put his talent and knowledge to the test to build ‘Bringgy’.

“So we decided to create a market place, because what it does is offset a lot of the cost instead of everybody having to go and build their website. There is a space where they can go and still give links to their customers and their customers can still come to this place and see their products and order from them,” he said.
Carter noted that the easy-to-use website, ‘Bringgy’, can be described as the middle man or messenger that connects the seller to the buyer.

“The idea of the market place was actually birthed during the start, height or should I say the beginning of the whole COVID-19 situation, especially in Guyana when we went into the lockdown; so again the ultimate goal was for [persons] to come to this site and get anything you need and have it brought to your home so that is where the name ‘Bringgy’ came,” he said.

He added: “We wanted you to kno immwediately what it is about from the name so that is why we went with something like Bringgy.”
In addition, Carter noted that if a business owner has difficulty making a delivery to a customer, the Bringgy team will step in and make the delivery on the owner’s behalf.
“If the sellers are not able to handle the delivery, the market place handles the delivery so once somebody makes an order we also get notified and we will be that middle person to arrange the delivery let the courier go to the seller and collect the product and then take it to the customer,” he said.

The duo noted that they are currently in the works of building a mobile application that will have a tracking feature which will allow consumers to track an item they would have purchased upon its delivery as well as pay for their items digitally.