We conducted our very first Shopify meet & greet in Kathmandu Nepal today (22nd Dec 2019). It was great to meet agencies and developers working on shopify from Nepal.
The main purpose of this meet & greet is to bring partners and developers together. We discussed about the shopify projects and apps, challenges on development aspects and challenges for Nepali merchants to choose Shopify.
How it all started?
I get contacted by merchants, developers and agencies here in Nepal regarding shopify and being asked about choosing shopify, questions on development and projects offers. This might be from my blog which appears on most search engines when being searched for shopify developer in Nepal or via linkedin. During this procedure I get connected with energetic entrepreneur Roshan Bhattarai, who is cofounder of Proshore. On our first meeting we talked about shopify projects and apps and later we come up idea of gatherig parthers and developers here in Nepal. We started by creating an event on meetup.com and started inviting our connection. I invited almost all agencies and developer here in Nepal working on shopify platform and he did same.
Why?
This idea of meetup was to get our network of shopify people strong, as networking is the assets now 🙂
Unlike of other platforms which are regularly doing events for eg. of wordpress, we lack this community of shopify. This is a win win situation for all who joined the event. Before this event there are partners and developers working on shopify on our own scattered and after this event we have a connection to most agencies and developers.
Achievements from first Meet & Greet.
Personally I came to know more agencies and developers working on shopify in Nepal and this would gonna obviouly help on my business. And this should be same for others as well. We meet other like minded professionals in this industry. The ideas being shared during out meet is amazing. It was great to hear what people are working on how they are working on in this platform and their clients. We also discussed about apps and suprisingly we were joined by two cofunders of one of the successful app named InkBay. They joined our meet all the way from Bangladesh. It was nice to know their business model and app.
Challenges for Nepali merchants to choose shopify
The very first challenges for Nepali merchants to choose shopify is we lack access to internationl payment gateways. We can’t receive money on Paypal here in Nepal. There are few alternatives and people are doing this somehow but is not easy reachable as it should be. In the current scenario merchants running ecommerce stores here in Nepal use local payment gateways and COD.
And another bigger prople for Nepali merchants to choose shopify is we lack these available payment gateway for shopify.
What next?
We have decided to host our meetings regularly and we are hosting on our offices. We hope to do official shopify meetup Kathmandu in 2020. What are the challenges for this is yet to figured out but before this we want to reach out to more agencies and developers and then only it would be possible.
You can find more about this event and pictures here –Â https://www.meetup.com/Shopify-Developers-Partners-Nepal/
Linkedin post
Cherrs 🙂
Graduated from 
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