Bequester allows small businesses who want to buy any product to post “Buy Requests” thus allowing suppliers to bid on those requests. Such gives suppliers the opportunity to lower their prices as well as exposing them to new clients. “Buying something takes time, you have to look for suppliers, call them.
But with us everything is done for you,” says Thabo Makenete co-founder of Bequester, an innovative service that facilitates business to business transactions between businesses that require to buy goods and services and those that supply them. Thabo together with Grant Monareng, another co-founder, initially launched this resourceful platform on February 2012 and made a re-launch on 26 February this year.
Why Bequester?
Bequester is a platform that facilitates buying and selling between businesses. It basically works between suppliers and customers. The platform lowers costs of buying products by providing a platform where different businesses can make transactions. “Bequester is useful because the costs incurred when one is chasing for business leads are very high.
One has to make several calls and this is expensive and besides, using Bequester has advantages taking into account the growing of our network hence an increase of business leads,” said Grant. Thabo added, “The platform gives small businesses the buying power to negotiate lower prices on whatever they need to buy. Small businesses don’t do the negotiations, our transparency does that because we allow all bidders to display their bids hence one will choose who they want to do business with.”
How does it work?
Bequester allows small businesses who want to buy any product to post “Buy Requests” thus allowing suppliers to bid on those requests. Such gives suppliers the opportunity to lower their prices as well as exposing them to new clients. Thabo said, “One can make a request for quotations by simply putting it on the site, we then send emails to all our suppliers listed in our database to alert them on the product.
The site is there to establish a fastest relationship between a supplier and a customer.” With “Sell Offers”, Bequester allows suppliers to place their product and this is done at a discounted price thus offering low prices for buyers.
How Thabo and Grant are benefiting
The two budding entrepreneurs charge a certain fee for each and every transaction made. “When one bids, we charge 1% of the value of the product and 3% is charged for every transaction made. Everything is done,” said Thabo. Grant added: “users buy credits which allow them to post and respond to business leads and that’s how we benefit.” The pair have so far done two transactions with a US web development company and a local business here in South Africa.
Competition and risk of the business
Thabo says their business has competition from giant financial institutions who have so much exposure but argues their targets are different. “Yes there is competition, we have one ABSA, they have a similar platform but theirs mainly focuses basically on transactions between small and big businesses while ours focuses on transactions between small businesses,” said Thabo.
With regards to risk, Thabo said, “the internet is quite risky, there is always another company that can come up with a same platform, and the risk is competition.”
Bequester app on the cards
An app for this invention will in the next three months be launched and users will be able to access Bequester on Android, Blackberry, IOS and Windows phone. Grant says they, “decided to come up with an app because many people live with their mobiles and it would be much more convenient and quicker for them to respond to business leads. It also helps to keep them with times of what’s available on Bequester.”
Bequester has so far generated 1 700 users against 150 it accumulated between February 2012 and February 2014. The twosome have already raised funding for the marketing and development process of their business with the thrust of generating more users on the site. The duo have already identified a few companies they would want to partner with in this project.
