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Zaarly: Mobile Marketplace For Small Businesses

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What if your small business could monitor the needs of your local community in real-time for services and products you provide? Imagine getting a text message when a local person or business posts that they would pay X dollars for your services/products. With

Zaarly can be compared to Craigslist or eBay, but with a much more mobile-friendly interface. The strength of the system is that it allows for users to very quickly post requests, like an impulse buy.

The next big online service?

Begun in early May of 2011, this brand new company has high hopes for its future. A strong financial backing (Zaarly announced it raised $14.1 million in financing last October) and top supporters such as Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, as a board member, Zaarly looks like it may become the next big online service.

What is Zaarly?

Designed from the ground up to be a mobile marketplace for any and everything, Zaarly allows consumers to post on their mobile phone or computer to make a request for, well, anything. The consumer has to fill out two pieces of information:

  • what they want
  • and how much they’ll pay for it.

In a few seconds, they can ask for products or services ranging from “I’ll pay $20 if someone will bring me a hamburger and a shake” to “I’ll pay $5,000 for a car.”

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Finding Buyers

For small businesses within a community, Zaarly could present a gold mine of new customers.

  • As a seller, you can create alerts that look for category-based requests, for example, yard work, babysitting, and other services.
  • You can limit the price minimum so you do not see too many alerts that are outside of your minimum dollar amount.

Once an alert pops up, you simply respond and work out the details directly with the buyer. A sample alert would only look for three pieces of information:

  1. proximity (which you can set),
  2. the category,
  3. and the minimum price.

Conversations

Zaarly allows for both parties of a transaction to communicate prior to the sale being completed. As a seller, you can ask for more information from the buyer and suggest a different price. As an example. You do not have to immediately accept the general terms as a seller. Zaarly just gets the conversation going for you and gives you the opportunity to close deals.

Related post:  Are You Using Mobile Shopping To Drive Sales?

Payments

The Zaarly app has a built-in payment processing system similar to PayPal. Buyers submit their payment information and send payment to sellers. No transactional data is passed on to the seller. Transaction fees are comparable to PayPal and similar payment systems.

Find out more about Zaarly:

So what do you think? Could Zaarly become an asset to your small business?