Twenty-two-year-old Haopei Yang migrated to Guyana at the age six to join his father, the proprietor of a Sheriff Street restaurant. He attended school in Guyana, first, at Redeemer Primary and later at Mae’s where he secured his tuition for the Caribbean Examinations Council examinations. Later, he attended the university, briefly, his ambition to pursue a degree in Computer Science cut short by a conviction that his interest in information technology could best be satisfied by learning on his own. Yang, save and except the vaguest trace of an accent in his fluent English, is a typical Guyanese young man. Guyana, he says, is his home and he has no desire to live anywhere else.
Earlier this week Stabroek Business spoke with Yang about his current preoccupation with the imminent launch of a new website, Best of Guyana.gy (BoGY), a social online directory of places, products and services in Guyana. Yang says his new website is about “connections and conversations” that allow for what he describes as “effortless communication and sharing of content.”
BoGY is designed to allow ‘subscribers’ to create profiles through which they provide information kits ranging from simple personal biodata to detailed promotional profiles. Its particular relevance to Guyana, he says, is that it is structured to provide the business community with a useful and inexpensive tool for the marketing and promotion of their goods and services.
BoGY allows for the creation of business profiles, packages of information that provide details of products and services including images and other multimedia communication tools. BoGY is also designed to create gallery image slide shows that capture the atmosphere of the business being displayed, in other words, a virtual business house. More targeted marketing on BoGY allows for the ‘individualization’ of products, placing items on separate pages equipped with tiny tags, customs keywords designed by owners to allow for easy access to specific details.
Other BoGY features include communication tools shared by logged-in users and the business enterprises offering profiles to allow for a measure of instant online customer service. Additionally, users may recommend specific profiles to others via Facebook, Twitter and other social networking means with the frequency of recommendation of the business providing the owner with information regarding the extent of the marketing offered by the site.
Yang believes that BoGY offers a useful opportunity for small and new businesses to establish branding through the site’s social sharing tools and allows for the placing of elaborate dissemination through service pages. Users, he says, will, through the site, secure a detailed grasp of goods of services displayed on a single service page. On the consumer side, the service provided by BoGY significantly reduces the time and effort required to locate a product or service while allowing for multiple choices since products and services of a similar nature are grouped together.
BoGY, Yang says, was developed “with Guyana in mind.” He believes that the website provides a medium that can help Guyana in its preparation for globalization. “The internet is an invaluable tool for this goal.”
Yang says the creation of BoGY represents his own modest attempt to respond to what still remains the virtual non-existence of e-commerce in Guyana. He points out that with the exception of a handful of larger businesses that can afford the cost of developing websites to provide e-commerce services, the high cost of developing such sites, which includes hosting and maintenance costs serve to deny smaller businesses the competitive advantages associated with internet marketing.
According to the creator of the new website another deterrent to e-commerce in Guyana is that many of the traditional businesses houses in Guyana which were trading long before the advent of the internet and are unfamiliar with the merits of the use of the internet technology as a marketing tool are not inclined to invest in e-commerce as a marketing mechanism. “Internet-reluctant traders are quick to discard the idea of internet marketing after being made aware of the cost of developing such websites,” Yang says.
Yang says that Best of Guyana seeks to provide an alternative that enables small businesses with limited funding to have access to marketing services associated with e-commerce. “The BoGY option provides that access and is significantly more affordable to small businesses in terms of both startup and maintenance costs. Additionally, the site offers users the opportunity to secure access to its premium profiles at no cost for thirty days. Or to sign up for a completely free basic profile service.
BoGY was recently launched on a trial basis.
