Woodland-based Nytch Offers Its Shopping App For Free To Help Local Merchants
Source: Sacramento Business Journal, Mark Anderson
Photo: Courtesy of Nytch, Inc.
Woodland shopping app company Nytch Inc. is giving its local shopping and search service away for free to help small businesses survive the Covid-19 closure of many small shops.
Small shops cannot compete on price with the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp., but they do have the benefit of service and expertise, and Nytch allows small retailers to play up their service advantage, said Grant Lea, co-founder and CEO of Nytch.
“We are trying to change the way people perceive online retail,” Lea said.
For a small retail shop, it doesn’t make sense to go online and to spend the time and money to post an entire inventory onto a website — and then hope customers find it.
Nytch allows local consumers to post what they are looking for, and then the small shop can respond if it has it, Lea said. The app allows stores to match shopper requests with what is available locally.
Customers include Goodwill Sacramento Valley & Northern Nevada, as well as retail shops and even animal rescue agencies.
Lea stresses that Nytch is not a directory. Rather, it is meant to be interactive and to help consumers find specific items, which the store owner or employees will know if they have in inventory.
“It is crowdsourcing from the other side,” Lea said.
Nytch has an online payment channel powered by PayPal Holdings Inc.’s (Nasdaq: PYPL) credit card payment program, but consumers don’t have to use that payment method. They can instead go to the store for pickup and pay on their own, Lea said.
“If they come into the store to get item A, they might see items B, C and D,” Lea said. “It can turn into multiple sales.”
Lea, who is currently also a practicing business attorney, started working on the concept four years ago. Nytch went live in April last year with 20 stores. It’s now up to 60 stores.
Before Covid-19, the plan had been to raise about $1.5 million in venture capital early this year, but the pandemic has made raising money more difficult.
The company decided to offer its services for free to help small retailers survive, Lea said.
The business model for non-pandemic times is to collect a 10% finder’s fee, which also includes the cost of the credit card processing.
In addition to finding small stores more customers, Nytch can also help retailers with market intelligence, Lea said. “You can get actionable data on what customers in your area want but that you don’t carry.”
Nytch has five equity owners, who are basically acting as contract employees to launch the business. It has only a trivial amount of revenue, at this point, and it won’t have any for some time as it’s now offering its service for free to consumer users and at cost to stores, Lea said.