SmilePepper’s competitors are primarily made up of ad-hoc transactions done on Social Media channels and other sales-facilitating applications.
Social media marketplaces (especially Facebook Marketplace), are where the majority of F&B HBBs hawk their products, and a majority of fresh leads are created here. They are mostly active on their pages and in food interest groups that were created during the pandemic and have continued to be active till this day. Transactions are completed by direct messaging the seller's business or personal accounts or responding to sales posts.
The issue with these platforms is that they only serve as a means to market their product, and then the transaction process is taken off the platform to a communication app to be manually fulfilled. The backend and other supportive processes still have to be done somewhere else, introducing complexity and interrupting an otherwise streamlined process. The strength of this platform is its familiarity with its audience and reach, and its low (or lack of) cost.
Take.app is the most common order management service used by HBBs at the moment. They provide an easy-to-use way of listing one's products and managing subsequent orders that come through. It is simple to use and is free up till a certain point, and they were first to market during the pandemic which gave them a headstart in terms of user base. However, they also do not have a combined marketplace where customers and merchants can gather, instead opting to provide individual websites/storefronts that are isolated from one another. While this is adequate for storefronts that can stand on their own, customers still need to be specifically directed to their storefront, thereby making new leads from organic discovery and “shopping around” very limited. The strength of this platform is their free tier, as well as how inexpensive the premium tier is as compared to their offerings.
Cococart and other marketplaces make up a fractional amount of the market share, and are rarely used by F&B HBBs. They suffer similar problems of only handling small parts of the F&B sale process instead of being a complete solution.
Competition
SmilePepper will look to either expand regionally in neighbouring South East Asian countries or to Australia, where one of our co-founders is located.
In Australia, regulations for HBBs exist, helping to remove some of the ambiguity around purchasing from HBBs as a customer. Australian HBBs are required to have the same level of food safety standards as any other F&B business.
Our research has also revealed the presence of many unique racial groups that have formed their own small-scale communities that buy and sell homemade F&B to one another through “group-buy”-esque Facebook posts. These isolated groups exist because Australia is not as cosmopolitan as compared to Singapore, and has extraordinarily strict laws about food importation. We’ve identified this as a core market that would appreciate a slightly modified version of the SmilePepper application to account for subroutines specific to these F&B HBBs.
Alongside this, research shows that many restaurants in Australia are closing down due to 3 main factors - Visionary shortcomings, lack of industry experience, and insufficient operating capital (Chefcollective, 2023). SmilePepper could be a great platform for new restaurateurs to kickstart or validate their F&B business ideas.
Nearby South East Asian regions have similar environments to Singapore and are easy to travel to for research purposes, making them viable candidates for expansion. There are many HBBs selling much more varied goods in these areas, making them prime candidates that could benefit from a service such as ours.
SmilePepper will also have to keep up with the latest trends in content creation in order to stay relevant. Livestreaming sales in particular are very popular amongst the Chinese market but is still in its infancy in Singapore (Tan 2023), but may be an untapped opportunity for HBBs with no retail stores to advertise and market their food. “Mukbangs”, or eating shows, are also a relatively new phenomenon that can also be used as a business tool to advertise food or merchants.
In order to retain customers, a platform-wide loyalty program, offering incentives in the form of discounts and exclusive offerings, can keep customers coming back for more. Giving customers rewards when they post reviews, photos and for other meaningful community interactions can also lead to a much more active community that markets itself.
With enough size and volume, SmilePepper also hopes to expand its service offerings to include delivery services as well. As of now, maintaining a consistent delivery workforce to service merchants is expensive and logistically challenging, and utilising ad hoc delivery men can result in service delays or further complications when it comes to scheduling. Another viable alternative would be to partner with a local delivery service to provide corporate or preferential rates to customers, instead of building our own delivery fleet.
Another service offered would be to offer our own food safety guarantees for HBBs in lieu of a government rating. Whilst there are no compulsory government regulations in Singapore for food safety for HBBs, we hope to offer a private inspection service that operates along the same guidelines that government inspectors use for commercial food entities. This will hopefully bridge the gap of food safety concerns that potential customers have when ordering from HBBs.
We hope to eventually expand the range of our services beyond just F&B HBBs. With the domain of F&B HBB being only a part of the market, we can look into expanding our services to other types of HBBs. There are plenty of local merchants who are renowned locally, and some even internationally, for selling a variety of products from their homes. From beautifully handmade resin art pieces that resemble the ocean, to custom Nerf blasters that perform better than their commercial counterparts, there’s a world of HBBs out there who could benefit from our platform.
Integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
As AI continues to become more and more groundbreaking each day, we aim to eventually include it into our SmilePepper offerings.
On the consumer end, AI based recommendation engines can deliver more precise recommendations to our customers based on their browsing habits and past purchases. Trained chatbots can help enlighten interested consumers about the origins of a specific foreign food being offered by a merchant or answer general questions about a merchant’s operations (Allen 2024). AI can be a prospective consumer’s friendly guide into a world of novel cuisine and pave the way for many new consumers.
For merchants, AI can play a key role in analysing reports and data, and offering recommendations to them to help them achieve their own business goals (Reilly, 2024). Complex data analysis is now within reach of the average merchant, and AI can help them see patterns and anomalies in their sales data which can translate into more sales and more profit. As mentioned earlier, AI chatbots can also do the heavy lifting when it comes to answering simple questions to assuage an unsure consumer. AI can also assist in basic copywriting for merchants who are unable to produce their own.
AI can also aid SmilePepper itself in improving its services through big data analysis, helping us identify ways to improve our own service offerings to our clients, whether it be more ideal times to post our reviews, more attractive ways of doing our copywriting, and so on and so forth.
We are excited for the future of AI, and we will continue to evaluate its potential impact on our operations.
Expansion Potential
Singapore