She decided to create a website that would help small businesses branch out into the online shopping market.

On her website ‘gifts4locals’ businesses can register and offer gift vouchers to shop at their store.

“I've gone in opposition to all the big merchant stores because you can buy these plastic gift cards in supermarkets, but all that money goes out of town,” Ms Beer said.

“So I thought I'd give all the small businesses the same opportunity to gain some income from that.

“So we created a website for all small businesses, we're starting in Griffith and hope to expand.

“So now the small family owned businesses of Griffith can actually register with us and sell gift vouchers online.”

She said she’d studied the trends that affect regional shops and decided now was the time to act.

“There's three major trends happening at the moment that affect retail industries in regional centres,” she said.

“One of them is gift card sales, the second is online shopping.

“There's always reports on TV, news about online shopping about how they're buying from outside of our centres so I thought why don't we combine these trends to support locals.

“The main thing is that the money will stay local.”

They have already attracted nearly 40 businesses to sign up and with Christmas nearly upon us she thought it would make an ideal time to launch.

“That's the glory of it and it's why we targeted this time of the year to launch it because we thought it would go off with a big bang,” she said.

“We're aiming it mainly at online shoppers and last-minute shoppers.”

She said the response from businesses around Griffith had been a positive one, even if they decided not to sign up.

“Some of them (businesses) think this is brilliant and jump on board straight away,” she said.

“I just think that if our local businesses don't have a really good Christmas season and make a good income from that then they don't really have a good year.”