Market shopping can be a tedious, time-consuming, and very frustrating errand. Especially if you want to be all hands on in your kitchen; you don’t want to delegate the task to your house help. This is a frustration faced by virtually modern day busy working women.
Things get more frustrating if you are very particular about what you want for your groceries. Looking for a bag of garri, egusi, unripe plantain, or beef that are fresh and affordable can be time-consuming and frustrating.
There is, therefore, an increasing need for convenient shopping, especially for busy people who don’t a lot of time to spare for the activity. There is a need for convenient grocery stores, and thanks to the internet, that store can be in the palm of your hands.
You also want value for money and at the same time not breaking your bank account to pay for the convenience. You also don’t want to spend hours online comparing prices and products for the best result.
Provider food chatbot to the rescue
Introducing Provider, a text assistant that helps you in shopping via Facebook Messenger or Telegram. When you send a food shopping list via Messenger or Telegram, you get back a text message with the foodstuff available within your budget range. You can then proceed to give your address for delivery and make payment online.
Provider’s goal is to make fresh and affordable groceries available at your fingertips because they know you are busy and at the same time don’t want to make compromises on your meals.
Mebele Benjamin, the CEO, and co-founder of Provider, in a press statement to innov8tiv, said:
“Our goal is to make food and condiments available through messaging and we use bots (chatbots, voice assistants) and existing channels to enable instant and sustainable 1-to-1 communication.
Shopping in markets gets a little overwhelming, especially with all the weekend hustle and bustle. We want to solve this problem by shopping for our customers through our messaging platform. Still, in the alpha stage, Provider is powered by natural language understanding, making food and condiments market more conversational, flexible, and convenient as possible.
As long as nothing is bought, there are no costs, because you can only pay for the value for convenient shopping. As soon as you are satisfied with your market list and you are ready to buy, payment is made.
The delivery address is also specified there. However, Provider charges a service fee from N3,000 to N10,000 depending on the value of your market list. You are always informed of the final price so that you don’t fall from the clouds when paying.”
