Zowasel Releases Mobile App To Boost Commodity Marketing
Zowasel, a company building sustainable value chain solutions to improve productivity, sustainability, and profitability for farmers, has released a one-stop-shop mobile application to directly connect farmers’ organizations with enterprise buyers.
This intuitive mobile app ushers in an era of unparalleled convenience, transparency, and efficiency. It democratizes access to enterprise purchase orders, all within a single platform where users can pick up orders, fulfil them, and receive payments within a remarkable 48-hour timeframe. The primary aim is to streamline the commodity trading process to save time and money for both buyers and sellers.
Farmers’ organizations register and provide information on their crops, and buyers build profiles with their specific preferences. These parties are matched based on location, supply, and demand, allowing them to agree on price and quantity for delivery.
One standout feature of the app is its ability to connect enterprise buyers willing to pay more for a specific crop with farmer organizations offering the right crops. This gives buyers the chance to directly source sustainable crops with extraordinary amounts of detail that translate into profits for both.
According to Jerry OCHE, Zowasel CEO, “The current commodity marketing system was created hundreds of years ago and needs to be disrupted. The pitch is straightforward. For farmer organizations, the marketplace promises greater transparency, making them less captive to opaque local prices to seamlessly save time and money.”
The app’s operation might seem familiar to users of a different type of matching app. Much like a dating app, the Marketplace app allows farmer organizations to set a radius within the app and then connect them to potential buyers within the selected area. Like dating apps, the Marketplace App employs a freemium model. The core platform is free for both buyers and sellers, with additional premium features and matching services for a fee.
Musa Danladi, a farmer based in Zaria, Kaduna State, has been working with Zowasel for a year and a half now. He says, “We’re early adopters in Zaria; we were involved with Granular when Zowasel started. We’ve always sought a seamless way to trade our crops outside the box”.
In 2021, Musa signed up on Zowasel, a process that took only a few minutes to create full crop inventory listings. He had the choice to either invite a Zowasel agent to visit his warehouse to test his crops or ship samples to the nearest Zowasel Crop Center for testing and grading, ensuring they met the buyers’ quality specifications.
The registration process is similar for buyers; Zowasel estimates a registration period of three days for financial due diligence, contracting, and onboarding on the platform.
Musa is not alone. Since the rollout of the marketplace, thousands of farmer organizations and hundreds of buyers have registered on the platform. “I’ve been in commodity marketing since I left secondary school in 1996. It’s amazing to see how Zowasel is reinventing commodity marketing,” Musa says.
The mobile app allows each player across the supply chain to simultaneously adopt and profit from their efforts. Specifically, farmer organizations working with Zowasel can maximize their profit from trading digitally. However, there are still significant barriers to overcome in terms of adaptation and connecting farmers digitally with premium markets.
Zowasel is actively addressing these challenges by establishing long-standing agribusiness relationships with farmer organizations through its remote Crop Center infrastructures strategically located across key farming communities to provide free pre-season, in-season, and post-season good agricultural practices to farmers and their interfacing organizations.
These efforts are helping to digitize farmers’ footprints and automate their entire value chain activities as data points to transition into sustainable agriculture and create access to alternative financing through its Alternative Credit Evaluation Scoring System (ACESS) to purchase improved inputs and guaranteed markets through quality testing and standardization.
Speaking on the mobile application, Gbenga Idowu, a cocoa farmer in Idanre, Ondo State, said, “It’s been an eye-opening experience that I’m able to produce cocoa that processors want, and that those processors are willing to pay a premium for it. The delivery service is excellent in this regard, allowing me to meet the processor deadline. With Zowasel’s support, I don’t feel like we need to worry about stopping the rest of the farm to deliver the crops to a processor.”
Through the app, farmers’ organizations can access a large network of listings as crops wanted and create their listings as crops for sale. They can review top bids and select whichever works best for them, weighing differences in price, amount, buyers’ location, and timing. This is done on a simple digital interface, replacing time spent travelling and marketing crops in local markets. Buyers, in turn, can source crops on the marketplace with specific characteristics, know their origin, and pass this information along to interested consumers as well.
Furthermore, Zowasel collaborates with logistics platforms, enabling customers to access a localized network of carriers for transporting agricultural products to buyers’ warehouses nationwide.
For inquiries about the Zowasel app or to download it, visit: https://bit.ly/3ZtaY4B or Email us at: marketplace@zowasel.com.
