Cloud software company Zoho on Tuesday launched a new point of sale (POS) solution brand Zakya for small and medium retail businesses to streamline their day-to-day operations and easily monitor them from one place. The solution, according to Zoho, can be implemented in under an hour for businesses with thousands of items in inventory.
Zakya includes POS billing app which also allows retail stores to bill even when used offline. During peak hours, sales personnel can use the Zakya POS billing app to parallelly bill customers and shorten the checkout queue.
The solution also enables businesses to launch a custom mobile app that allows their customers to browse and make purchases on their smartphones, and have the items delivered at home. Stores can also offer the option of in-store pickup.
Moreover, SMB retailers can manage all of their back office operations including inventory management, customer details, transaction information, and vendor data in one place, without the need to switch between multiple apps or records.
The POS solution also provides business intelligence (BI) and data insights for stores to enhance their performance around inventory, sales, purchases, etc. Zakya is pre-integrated with payment partners, including Pine Labs, Razorpay, and PhonePe and can also be integrated with shipment solutions such as AfterShip and EasyPost to fulfil customer orders.
“As consumers turn to online shopping, there is an increasing demand for digital solutions among retailers who want to stay competitive. However, the current solutions in the market either lack the necessary features to support retailers in their day-to-day operations or they are legacy software that are complex, rigid, and have a steep learning curve. Zakya bridges this gap by offering an easy-to-use solution that can be deployed quickly, lowering the barrier to technology adoption for small businesses,” said Jayagopal Theranikal, Chief Evangelist, Zakya.
The new solution caters to the near-future needs of retail SMBs based on a survey of 1,040 SMB retailers mainly from the retail, wholesale, restaurant, and services industries conducted in February 2024.
The survey conducted to determine the level of point of sale (POS) software adoption, usage, and impact on businesses in India noted that 95 per cent of the respondents who are currently billing manually said they would like to move to a modern POS solution by 2029. The top three features sought by retailers in a POS solution were ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and mobile billing.
Currently, only 39 per cent of the respondents were using a POS software for their billing operations. 48 per cent relied on manual operations like cash bills and 13 per cent used spreadsheets like Excel to manage their accounting and inventory management needs.
Only 5 per cent of the respondents said they did not want to adopt POS software due to cost and lack of knowledge about solutions in the market. These were businesses with annual revenue of less than Rs 5 crore.