After Londoners add more than 180 of their favourite small businesses to supportlondonbusinesses.com in just a few days, local tech companies partner to provide brick & mortar stores with help transitioning offline sales online.
Last week, rTraction launched supportlondonbusinesses.com with help from Benjamin Glauss, a local IT Consultant and Project manager. Supportlondonbusinesses.com is a website where Londoners can pledge to do one activity a day to support a local business. Visitors can also add their favourite business to a growing list posted at the footer of the site.
Yuser, Last Draft, and The RH Accelerator have joined the initiative, which is expanding to include free services that directly support business owners in setting up online stores. Katheen MacAinsh, Local Community Manager of Shopify for London, is also contributing to the effort.
The project will prioritize local product-based companies, especially those in Food+Drink and Retail, and will include:
- A virtual workshop on setting up online stores, hosted by London Small Business Centre, April 2nd (Participants must register, but there is no fee)
- The release of an instructional webinar [Date TBD]
- Free online office-hours Friday, March 27, 2:30-4pm + Friday, April 3, 2:30-4pm
David Billson, Co-Founder and CEO of rTraction was impressed with the community response and organizations looking to help the small business community. “We are grateful for the team at Yuser, Last Draft and others who have stepped up in a big way to help our community. We are constantly impressed by the way Londoners show up for Londoners.”
Eunika Sot, Co-Founder and COO of Yuser, adds, “I’ve noticed so many of my favourite local businesses trying to manage online orders through Instagram. This is a resource-intensive and inefficient process, but it proves that the demand from customers is there. All those businesses need online stores and they need them now.”
Businesses looking for support can sign up here to be contacted by email as services are released over the next few days. For questions contact: Jacob Sandler, jacob@lastdraft.ca.