Bridging the gap between local shopping and online

Student creates app

BY HALEY LENA HLENA@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

When local businesses started to close down due to the pandemic, University of Denver student JohnPaul Evans wanted to help. ree years later, Evans, who grew up in Parker, launched Harvester, a website that connects shoppers to their local businesses.

While talking with an owner of a running shoe store, Evans learned that many business closures were in uenced by the pandemic, but the problem started years before COVID-19.

“ e issue kind of started back around 2012, 2013 when online shopping kind of took o and especially online shopping with large retailers,” said Evans.

As Evans saw that online shopping made shopping too convenient of an option compared to shopping at local businesses, he began to think of a way to make it more convenient to shop locally online and make it an easy process.

For over a year, Evans tried to make di erent apps and played around with websites. rough Harvester, he made a marketplace that allows shoppers to search and browse products directly from local shops.

Harvester launched in February and already has 70,000 stores on the site for shoppers across the U.S.

“All the stores that are currently listed on Harvester are ones that already have kind of an online presence with a website and they have their inventories up already,” said Evans. “I found a way to nd a bunch of local businesses across the U.S. that had websites with all their products and consolidate them all to one site so they can shop directly from that store on.”

With Harvester, online shoppers can freely shop trending local businesses by entering their zip code. ey can also search for an item they are looking for and use the lter to sort by distance, price or relevance.