Tech for the average WhatsApp User (retail edition)
As a business owner in Africa, the problems that emerge daily never seem to stop. Petty, often avoidable problems rear their heads and derail business processes at all levels;
- Suppliers might have failed to deliver
- Vehicles for transportation of goods and materials may break down or be unavailable
- Staff may be absent from work due to a myriad of reasons, resulting in a slow customer service that day
- Sales reports from previous days may not tally with cash/money in hand
- Stock may run out without the manager knowing because of how divided their attention has to be to effectively run the business
- Customers may be owing the business for sales transactions done on credit but with no bonafide records kept, proper accountability is not met.
The right solution for nipping most of these problems in the bud is adopting a POS system into your business flow. First and foremost, you have to identify the problem areas within your business and how you would like it to be solved. An example of this is when you have a problem tallying sales reports with cash in hand. You may want to solve this by entrusting the multi-tiered process to a single system that can effectively run both processes concurrently and simultaneously.
Test your budget and financial allowances. Seek for a system that would be effectively run with your current financial status. Choose POS solutions that would be able to operate on a maximum-efficiency level without causing a huge financial mishap to your business. This would ensure that you can have real scale-able growth in your business’s efficiency and profits. Doing otherwise would only replace one problem with another.
Comprehend your technology flow. Understand if you and your staff are conversant with technology and to what level. Understand that this is very crucial to the effectiveness of the software solution. It is pertinent for the solution to be usable or at least easy to understand by regular, blue-collar working class people who have had minimal prior interaction with tech.
People often misunderstand the importance of this and go forward with complicated tech that goes over the heads of their staff / sales agents thus discouraging them from properly using the software for its intended purposes.
The next and last step is to research the market for a solution that suits your business and its specific needs. After the POS system, user training has to be done to ensure that those directly involved with using the system understand its processes and tools. The users being well-versed in the app goes to increase the efficiency of the solution at having its intended impact on your business and then some.
KudiGo StoreFront is a retail software solution that was specifically tailored for the African market. It takes into consideration the issues that plague African businesses, as opposed to their colleagues on other continents. One such major problem is the issue of the average African having very limited exposure to tech in its modern sense.
The solution has endeavoured to make its processes simple and easy to understand. KudiGo engineers often say that “We have made it so that the average WhatsApp Messenger user can use it”.
From an easy sign-up process to a simple and easy to navigate User Dashboard, StoreFront allows the Users to feel at home in the confusing world of retail tech.
Bright catchy images and legible, simple fonts are some of the techniques that this app employs to ensure the maximum usability by its African market. It offers itself as an introduction to a world of tech that seems so fast-paced and ever changing. Whilst its reassuring useability helps patrons manage their business with much more ease, the app’s processes rivals some of the best POS softwares in the world. It boasts of
- a connection to an ecommerce platform
- non-cash payment tools, barcode readers
- an integration with world-renowned accounting software SageOne,
- timely daily reports — with the day’s sales transactions sent to the business owner / manager
- credit sales feature, and
- a flexible sales feature to aid businesses with non-fixed pricing on the products / services
KudiGo StoreFront boasts of a very affordable pricing for their apps usage offering a free platform and a premium platform. StoreFront also works with POS devices to offer the maximum experience and efficiency to a business by offering printable receipts, card payments processing, long lasting battery power and offline useability.
With KudiGo StoreFront, you can have an easily accessible, affordable and detailed point of sale solution that would help you, as a business owner / manager, have complete oversight of all transactions, stock levels and reports of everything that happens in the business.
Sales order receipts sent via SMS to customers, company bookkeeping records saved on a cloud based storage, ecommerce platform and Mobile Money payments are some of the benefits that KudiGo StoreFront offers to every African business.
This was made in Africa, by African software engineers for an African market that is in a fast-paced, constantly evolving global village.
