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They walked every New West shopping area and created virtual versions

Can a small Vancouver company do for New Westminster businesses what a certain “online bookstore” did for offshore manufacturing over 20 years ago? Probably not, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying.
mylocal
Screenshot

Can a small Vancouver company do for New Westminster businesses what a certain “online bookstore” did for offshore manufacturing over 20 years ago? Probably not, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying.

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, many local stores and restaurants have struggled to get their products online, attract customers, or deal with the 20-30% commission fees charged by delivery services. Now, a free service called myLOCAL is hoping to change things.

Started as a work-from-home project by Dead Famous, a local advertising and digital agency previously involved in the City’s Riverfront, IDEA Centre and Intelligent City initiatives, myLOCAL creates virtual shopping neighbourhoods that allow visitors to swipe through hundreds of individual storefronts – mimicking how they would typically shop offline.

“We’ve walked a lot of blocks and put over 1,500 individual stores in the system already,” said Mike Fiorentino, co-owner of Dead Famous and a proud Sapperton resident. “Now, we’re working with remote teams to create myLOCAL sites across Canada and the United States, along with local delivery solutions that people can actually afford.”

In New West, users can swipe through digital storefronts in Downtown, Riverfront, Uptown, Sapperton and 12th Street shopping districts. The platform is built, individual storefronts have been entered, and businesses are now free to update their information and upload their products. 

new weest shopping
A sample page of New Westminster shopping areas. Screenshot

“If a business has an online store already, we can typically migrate the entire storefront in under five minutes,” said David Aitken, the digital lead on the project. “And if they don’t have an online store ready to go, they do now.”

“The idea came from simply walking my own neighbourhood in Mount Pleasant,” said Chris Kostyal, one of the founders of myLOCAL and co-owner of Dead Famous. “I thought that if we could create a free online marketplace for local businesses that felt like the neighbourhoods themselves, we could leverage the whole community and perhaps make buying local from home feel more like the real thing.”

Eight weeks later, myLOCAL is now live on Vancouver’s Main Street, Commercial Drive, Kitsilano’s West 4th Avenue, New West, and both Upper and Lower Lonsdale. While shopkeepers work to get their online stores up and running, visitors to myLOCAL-yvr.com can check their current status, tip individual businesses, visit their websites, and access any shopping or delivery options currently available.

With the ambitious goal of establishing a cross-border online marketplace for local business communities by the end of the year, there’s been no shortage of discussions around delivery between myLOCAL and the business community. “Enabling local delivery is our focus right now,” said Kostyal. “Our goal is to create a local gig-based solution that enables more deliveries across shorter distances, but the logistics required to pull this off for a multi-store order poses an interesting challenge.”

As local sites for Yaletown, Gastown, Davie, Denman, and Robson are currently in the works, myLOCAL hopes to get over 5,000 small businesses online by summer’s end. They are also working with South Granville’s BIA to establish a virtual shopping neighbourhood there, while in separate talks with Granville Island Market and the local craft beer community to create similar platforms for them.

In Toronto, myLOCAL will launch with Queen Street West next week, with more shopping districts following soon after across Canada. Initiatives have also launched in Los Angeles, where myLOCAL hopes to introduce their platform to an audience of over 12 million residents before migrating further into the United States.

To see which neighbourhoods are open for business or coming soon, visit the myLOCAL homepage.