Social Glass: MICRO - An E-Commerce Marketplace with Government Users in its DNA
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Social Glass: MICRO - An E-Commerce Marketplace with Government Users in its DNA

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Paola Santana, Founder & CEO, Social GlassPaola Santana, Founder & CEO
Governments are the biggest purchasers in the world, spending a significant amount of their GDPs in public expenditures. Still, the complex and outdated processes of public procurement are often characterized by non-intuitive user flows and interfaces, poor performance visibility and repetitive manual implementation by highly-specialized public officers. This complexity leads to inefficiencies affecting all public procurement transactions across agencies, especially micro-purchases, those direct purchases typically under a low dollar amount. When aggregated, micro-purchases represent approximately $150 Billion market in the US.

A successful micro-purchase, one that provides the best value for taxpayers dollars, require officers to juggle budget availability and conduct competitive market and pricing analysis in an expedited manner, to carry out an informed and optimal transaction. In addition, they need to ensure that changes in regulation and policy goals are effectively being taken into consideration in every purchase, and that suppliers comply with the basic requirements needed to sell to government.

To carry out their public procurement tasks, government agencies have adopted various technology platforms natively built for enterprise, which do not directly accommodate or benefit the user-specific intricacies that are present in government operations. To curtail the intricacies, governments demand a unique system that simplifies decision-making in small purchasing transactions, at the time of maintaining compliance and providing cost-saving insights related to purchasing patterns.

In a world where efficiency and disruptive innovation are essential values, Social Glass is looking to transform the way governments operate, starting with micro-purchases. Helping governments digitize, streamline, scale, and expedite E-procurement decisions is the core offering of this Silicon Valley-based software company, whose mission is to build purposeful and transformative government technology using artificial intelligence (AI). For this purpose, Social Glass has created MICRO, an e-commerce marketplace that aids government agencies in acquiring goods, services, and rentals digitally.

MICRO enables fully-compliant, agile, and paperless micro-purchases. “No subscription or training required, government officers only have to provide minimal details like their official email ID and a compliant method of payment, such as a credit card, to utilize MICRO,” extols Paola Santana, Founder and CEO of Social Glass.



Our goal is to simplify and streamline the micro-purchasing process by curating the suppliers and accomplishing all the legwork on behalf of the government officers to save their valuable time


“An officer can complete a micro-purchase in a few simple steps—search, sort, add to cart, and check out.” MICRO has an intuitive web-based marketplace with goods and services from numerous verified suppliers from whom government departments can buy, contract, or rent items. Any government staffer can, for instance, conveniently purchase necessary office or emergency supplies, agency-approved software, or even rent a conference venue and hire catering services, all through the same platform. The transaction details are displayed in a visual dashboard, facilitating staffers to conveniently and quickly track their orders and keep key terms of purchase such as warranty and insurance at a glance. While the suppliers are verified for their legitimacy and past performance before being onboarded into MICRO, the marketplace brings real-time data insights into competitive pricing. Sorting is done based on factors such as price, delivery time, or supplier ratings. What’s more, MICRO tracks (and thus encourages) local businesses, procurement diversity goals and policy implementation for compliance.

“Our goal is to simplify and streamline the micro-purchasing process by curating the suppliers and accomplishing all the legwork on behalf of government officers to save their valuable time,” says Paola. The government officers can utilize the time saved by purchasing through MICRO to focus on other key efforts towards the public good. “We have the unique requirements of a typical government user weaved into the DNA of our platform. Therefore, they can easily overcome the integration challenges and avoid the blind spots in decision-making.” Indeed, Social Glass brings transparency and efficiency into direct procurement, achieves cashless transactions successfully, reduces cost, and ensures better and faster availability of products and services for government buyers. Further, the digital platform documents every product purchase date; in case of any malfunction within the warranty period, the government officer can easily activate the warranty conditions, inform the vendor, and save costs for the government agency. By making the daily operations of governments more efficient, Social Glass is clearing up time and energy for government officers to focus on what matters the most: Governing.

Besides adding new features for product shipment tracking, the company plans to aid suppliers in business expansion. In the near future, the Social Glass team also aims to implement machine learning technology to provide in-depth analytics and insights to both government agencies and suppliers.