Maker2u - The New Online Farmers Market for small Kiwi food producers.

Maker2u - The new online farmers market will allow families in isolation to shop directly with hundreds of small food producers (176 and growing fast) all around NZ with their goods being delivered by courier.

These small businesses have seen their sales dry up completely. They desperately need our help now to stay alive.

The Maker2u team have created this marketplace using our own resources. We expected a normal website launch where we would have only a few shoppers each day. But with COVID-19 the marketplace was swamped within the first 24 hours of launch on Monday. Hundreds of stressed makers wanted to set up stores and thousands of customers looking to buy from them.

This has put real pressure on our team and the website.

It is great to be able to help these businesses. But our small team have barely slept for two weeks preparing Maker2u for the volumes we expected from COVID-19.

We have reduced the marketplace commission to 10% which only covers credit card fees and the costs of hosting and operating.

Our developers and customer support people are not being paid yet. We are struggling to meet this completely unprecedented demand and we have had to use our credit cards to increase the web hosting capacity three times already - which is expensive.

We desperately need to raise some funding to help us bring on more developers, further upgrade the hosting and expand our customer support team to keep this marketplace fully operational - for all of the amazing small kiwi businesses and families who want to use Maker2u.com during the Covid 19 lockdown. Any help will be hugely, hugely appreciated.