Quikr has introduced a website called Still Open to help citizens locate the nearby functioning grocery stores (Photo Sanjit Das/Bloomberg)
With India under 21 days lockdown to fight coronavirus pandemic people across the nation are facing difficulties to buy daily essentials given stores are functioning only between a certain time period with very minimal products available. To resolve this issue, Quikr has introduced a website called Still Open to help citizens locate the nearby functioning grocery stores, medical stores, COVID-19 testing centres and other stores classified under essential services.
Still Open is a crowdsourcing platform that ensures the website is updated at regular intervals. Speaking to indianexpress.com Sonu Abhinandan, VP at Quikr said that the team is working from home and manually calling stores to find out whether they are open and functioning or not. The team is then updating the website with accurate information.
Still Open is a crowdsourcing platform that ensures the website is updated at regular intervals.
Given it’s a crowdsourcing platform people who visit a store can provide user feedback such as whether the store is open, if it’s hygenic, products available and more. The platform also allows users to put reviews of the places online, upload images and more.
Abhinandan confirmed that the service is currently available in 23 cities across India in the English language. However, he did confirm that the company plans to rollout the platform in 10 to 13 vernacular languages very soon to have a larger reach.
The idea of Still Open is driven from the initiative Quikr took during demonetization. Back then the company took similar steps and created a platform, which used to update on a regular basis with information about the open ATMs with money and which ones have long queues. The Still Open platform is based on the same principle, just tackling a different problem.
Abinandan clarified that the platform when launched performed extremely well in Bangalore and has now started expanding its reach in cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. He did not provide us with the exact numbers of users.
How to use the platform
On desktop/laptop
* To use the website on your PC, open up a web browser and head to https://stillopen.quikr.com/open-stores-near-me.
* The website will ask you to activate your desktop’s location services.
* After activating the services the site will reload and bring you to quite a minimalistic page, where it will provide you with an option to donate or share the page with your friends. It will also allow you to change your location, choose a particular service that you are trying to find, precautions for COVID-19 and a link to donate to the PM CARES fund.
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* There you can select the specific type of service that you are looking for and get all the information about all the specific service centres nearby. It also gives users directions.
* You will be able to provide your views on the stores by pressing the ‘Update’ button that shows next to their names.
On mobile phone
The mobile website is similar to what shows up on the PC and follows the same procedure. I could not find any app for the platform on either Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store.