SELLITIC, a global multi-vendor marketplace built for creators in the handicraft space has chosen Nigeria to be its inaugural destination to pilot. The artisanal marketplace, which is part of a social impact ecosystem called AFOMA, is designed and built to support artists and artisans (creatives) across the globe with an emphasis on emerging markets.
According to the IMARC Group, the global handicraft market is projected to reach US$ 1,252.30 Billion by 2027, exhibiting a growth rate (CAGR) of 10.41% between 2022-2027. However, the cost of doing business, the lack of digitization and payment fragmentation within the creative economy continues to stifle creators across Africa. SELLITIC is designed and built to address these challenges.
The marketplace will leverage emerging technologies and a purpose-driven business model that will break barriers to entry and decrease operational costs for artists and artisans looking to gain fair access to the global market.
The purpose-driven approach allows SELLITIC to offer a free tier subscription model that supports micro and small-scale creators. In addition, the e-commerce platform will offer shipping labels that will allow artists and artisans (creators) to ship their products to all parts of the globe without any upfront cost. Most importantly, the marketplace will offer low transaction costs for remittances to creators for their products sold on the platform.
The emergence of blockchain technology and its adoption has created room for the innovation that allows SELLITIC to adopt a non-traditional and decentralized business model. With the adoption of blockchain technology, creators will be part of the ecosystem’s community where they are incentivized for conducting good business and marketplace practices. This incentives or rewards program using the OMA token, the utility token native to the AFOMA ecosystem, in the long run will allow them to be a part of the governance of the entire ecosystem. This novel approach to drive a sharing economy, is unquestionably unique to this space, which allows SELLITIC to be recognized as the “world’s first decentralized handicraft marketplace”.
SELLLITIC is also poised to enhance the informal economy. The team recognizes how critical the informal economy is to the GDP countries across the globe, especially in developing countries. According to the World Economics, the informal economy size (% in GDP) in Nigeria alone is about 57.7%. So creating job opportunities within this sector is what the marketplace looks to contribute. This can come in the form of microworkers, where individuals from across Nigeria and other parts of the globe can enter the gig economy and contribute towards social good and be incentivized for doing so. These microworkers can perform various tasks ranging from offering their digital skills to creators who lack these skills to offering boots on the ground where they can source and onboard artists and artisans in rural regions of the globe.
According to the Financial Times, there are signs that crypto is quietly building deeper roots in the developing world. Especially in countries which have a history of financial instability or where the barriers to accessing traditional financial products such as bank accounts are numerous, cryptocurrency use is fast becoming a fact of daily life. This is why SELLITIC will adopt cryptocurrency (such as stablecoins) as an option for remittance for both creators and microworkers. This will not only emphasize on their mission to break barriers, but to ensure that in doing so, the creators can maximize their profits (due to low transaction costs). In addition, remote work through the services rendered by microworkers can be enabled by eliminating payment fragmentation experienced across Africa.
The adoption of crypto by the marketplace will inevitably create a massive amount of entrepreneurial opportunities within the creative and (or) the informal economy.
SELLITIC’s pilot program will commence in October, 2022. For artists and artisans in the handicraft space looking to pilot with them, the enrolment process can be started by accessing the below link:
https://sellitic.com/corporate/pilot-program/
Describing the pilot phase and release of the marketplace, Eric Osuorah, the Founder of SELLITIC said: “Our mission is to create opportunities for creators to scale beyond their local economy and compete on the global market where they can earn in a foreign currency and be accessible to their countrymen and countrywomen living in the diaspora. We chose to start with Nigeria because of its huge potential and market size in the handicraft space. Succeeding in our mission in Nigeria, will allow us to build a template to succeed in other parts of Africa and across the globe”.
For more information about SELLITIC, please visit their website https://sellitic.com/corporate and across their social media channels at Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook.
