Transformation from “e-shopping mall” to “social shopping platform” to “mobile commerce platform”
A journey of thinking, rethinking, unlearning and alignment
The beginning — “e-shopping mall”
We have redefined our concept a few times in the past. When we started the company, it began as “e-shopping mall” because the platform could host thousands of shops and from the point of view of the user, he can pick and choose which shops to follow and thereby creating his own set of shops he would frequently buy from, leading to creating a personalised shopping mall.
Based on this idea, we went ahead with the concept of e-shopping mall.
But later we understood that potential clients were having difficulty in understanding a totally new concept and honestly we found that “e-shopping mall” sounded particularly boring and it lacked the coolness that is required to get any popularity at all on social media.
Rethinking — “Social shopping platform”
Coincidentally while we were rethinking the concept, we released the social features for “what’s new” feed, after this release, from the point of view of the customer, he could follow his favourite shops and he could get notified of “what’s new” just like in any other social media sites like Twitter or Facebook, so we thought that “social shopping” would be much more appropriate and it also had the added benefit of sounding cool and hip.
We ran with this idea for a few months, then we understood that the product itself does not have equal weightage on the social side, compared to the e-commerce side.
For a product to be called a social shopping platform it should be more social than commerce.
But for Zagl it wasn’t true, the e-commerce was dominant compared to social, and the primary focus was mobile, and the idea of social shopping do not encapsulate mobile in any form.
Alignment — Mobile Commerce Platform
Upon realising this, we went back to the roots of the product itself and tried to understand why we started this product and what was the actual problem that you’re trying to address. It wasn’t difficult for us to see that we started as a white label mobile apps company and when Apple tightened it’s rules against white-labelled apps, we realised that white label apps business is no longer sustainable and
because of this change thousands of small businesses will suffer as they could not afford to have their own app built.
So basically to address this problem, we started Zagl. So in retrospect it would have been more more appropriate to have called the platform as mobile commerce platform, because our goal is to solve the problem of providing mobile apps for e-commerce businesses.
Justification (lame …)
It is not unusual for startups to bounce around a few ideas before they get to the crux of what they’re trying to solve. I should also admit that a few businesses are extremely lucky and they start with a clear definition of what they’re trying to achieve.
For us it’s quite unfortunate that it has taken a few months into the journey to really understand and figure out what exactly Zagl stands for. But having said all this I’m extremely happy that we were finally able to challenge ourselves constantly to rethink and realign our thoughts with our offering to the market.
For newbies, Zagl is a mobile commerce platform that reduces the barrier of entry into the app store and Google Play and let’s businesses enjoy the same benefits of having their own mobile app, including notifications. For more information check out our website or write to us at support@zagl.io
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
