A store for WhatsApp

Francisco Larios, founder of Mercapp Santi Burgos

The arrival of the pandemic and the consequent closure of stores reminded Francisco Larios of his own fall into ruin.

It was during the Great Recession that his agricultural software project — he designed a computerized greenhouse management system — which had got off to a good start in Extremadura and had been able to expand to Chile, went under.

"In addition to the crisis, they were commercial errors due to lack of experience," he acknowledges.

He paid off his debts and maintained a small software company, Softcode, created in 2002, which grew to 38 employees.

"It was a spectacular 2020," he says, when the pandemic and confinement arrived.

At that moment he realized the anguish of the merchants, and from there Mercapp was born.

It is a WhatsApp-based system that allows merchants to easily create a virtual store.

"We thought of an application, but we believed that no one was going to download it to buy from the fruit vendor, and a website seemed a bit cold to us," says Larios.

Finally, they decided on WhatsApp.

"We designed a system that, by sending a message to a number saying 'Hello', allows you to create a virtual store in three steps: you start the store, load the products you want, their price and a photo, and that's it," he explains.

Once the store is created, the system sends a message to the merchant with a link and a QR code, which the entrepreneur can easily share with his contacts and customers.

"The idea was to sell to regular customers," he says.

Cyntia Medina did it and, in the worst moments of confinement, she contributed almost 80% of the sales of Her-Decó, her herbalist in Guadarrama, and now it is around 20%.

Its users make the order and come to pick it up for the most part, because the tool allows you to make an appointment, account.

With the pandemic, Medina created an association of merchants, Guadarrama Comercio, to ask the City Council for help.

Of the 155 partners, about 40 use the Mercapp tool.

Thanks to a radio program and a press release, the initiative became known and stores throughout Spain and Latin America began to register.

They now have about a thousand stores in 13 countries, with more than 7,000 products and about 1,500 orders a month.

"People were desperate to sell," he explains.

At first, they did not include payment or distribution systems, due to their cost.

The idea was just to "make it easy" for the businessman.

But success made it necessary to reinforce the tool.

Larios put two people full-time with Mercapp and they were adding functionalities, and they are already working to incorporate means of payment, a messaging company or integrate it with other applications such as Telegram or Signal.

At the moment, everything is free, but the idea is to monetize its use by charging a fixed fee, never more than 30 euros, from a certain level of billing.

They expect to have about 8,000 stores by the summer.