Network Effects and Scaling: Ideas from Delivery Apps

A primary reason we are excited about building a quality, reliable, standard name in B2B Omnichannel retail SaaS is the snowball effects from a successful product.

To take an analogy from delivery apps such as Doordash, an advantage the network has is increased customer account creation. Users are more willing to create accounts when they know they can use the service across many different restaurants. Much fewer users are willing to create accounts specifically for one chain, let alone one mom-and-pop shop, as it’s just more complexity to maintain in their daily lives (a separate set of usernames and passwords, for example).

If the Omnistore platform begins to pick up traction and is adopted across different verticals, sectors, and brands, it becomes a centralized ecosystem for physical retail. Users can track their purchases, receive promotions and loyalty points, and check for nearby deals in one place. By the nature of being a B2B SaaS platform, the utility scales with the number of businesses, which in turn would scale the number of partnered businesses. It’s an accelerating, positive feedback loop.

At a certain scale, smaller businesses would receive significant externally-sourced traffic from the Omnistore platform in the same way smaller restaurants receive traffic from Doordash’s search function. This would further incentivize being on the platform. If our products are reliable and useful, over time the brand and exposure itself becomes a selling point for future partnerships.

Finally, in the far future, in the best-case scenario we are working towards, we will have integrated with many disparate merchant verticals and sizes. In this sense, we have aggregated many different inventories in the same platform. This kind of unification allows for features like an Instacart-esque delivery marketplace for physical retail.