Doing our part to help local businesses affected by the pandemic with Consume Colimote

If you’ve been following my personal news, you know that as of a few months ago I became Chief Consultant at MagmaLabs, headquartered in Colima, Mexico. As such, I’m super proud to share with you one of our coolest new initiatives, designed to help keep the local economy moving during the ongoing pandemic crisis.

Consume Colimote is an ecommerce platform kind of like Amazon or MercadoLibre, but designed especially for small business owners in Colima. We’re running it as a non-profit operation — signup is free for local shops, vendors, and service providers, giving them the ability to quicky and effectively setup a professional online storefront and transact business with clients.

Local businesses all over the world are suffering due to social distancing guidelines and the imperative to stay home. For many of them, the technical challenges and costs involved in mounting a new online presence make the effort impossible.

A couple months ago at MagmaLabs, when we started realizing that the crisis was probably going to go on much longer than anyone hoped, we started looking for a way that we could help. One of our main strengths as a company is development of ecommerce storefronts, so we quickly figured out that it was an area where we could make a big positive impact in our local community.

The platform is now live with 70 vendors participating and many more in the pipeline. We’re not only providing the technical platform, we’re also hosting a whole series of workshops covering everything involved in making a new shop a success, including ecommerce basics, online marketing, electronic communications best practices, content authoring, etc.

The overarching goal is to try not to exclude anyone, even the smallest mom and pops. Plus we want everyone that puts in the effort to get their new shop up and running on the platform to be able to make the most of it.

On a technical note, the project has been a joy for everyone involved since we took the opportunity to flex our development muscle with all the latest technology. We’re running on Rails 6.0.3, Ruby 2.7, and Solidus (master), as well as a shiny new ecommerce product that we’ve yet to unveil.