A smart online till for vendors

ROMA – STREET vendors (baitšokoli) will soon have their own tills, just like in big supermarkets, but on their phones. Their tills will be an online app.

“With it, street vendors will keep accurate records of their sales,” Khotso Mohanoe, a former student of the National University of Lesotho (NUL) involved in the project said.

“If someone is selling to you as a street vendor, you can still log into the app at anytime of the day to see how their sales are going,” he said.

Imagine you are a street vendor and you have this app on your phone. This is how your typical day might look like. First you decide what goods you are going to sell. Maybe you decide to resell bananas, apples, oranges and sweets.

You go restock them. You have already created a barcode (or a QR Code) for each of the four items. After stocking, you now log into your app and tell the app how many of the bananas, apples, oranges and sweets you have bought on that day.

Then the selling begins. The first buyer is already here. She wants five bananas, one orange and two sweets. You open your app and scan the banana barcode or QR code. Then you put in the quantity of bananas being bought, which is five in this case, into the app.

You do the same for the orange and the sweets. The app immediately calculates the total amount the buyer pays and how much change they should get back. But before some change is given, the app asks you, the vendor, if that was all the buyer wanted.

It could be that the buyer still wants to buy more. If she does, more scans are made and more quantities are put in. More totals are counted and the change is given, if any. If the buyer no longer has anything to add, then that specific purchase is closed.

But it has been recorded. This is very important because in the end, the records might say something about the deeply hidden behaviour of buyers. The record could show the vendors that many buyers are more likely to buy oranges only if sweets are also there.

More on what the records can tell later. Then another buyer is already here. A new purchase starts. This guy just needs an orange and an apple, that’s all. The same process is repeated. Now it could be that both of these first buyers are not necessarily interested in having receipts.

But what if they are? Well, this machine, can also generate a receipt. Buyer one gave M30, and got back M5.30 in change. Unlike a normal receipt, this receipt is not printed on paper. Rather it is just sent though WhatsApp to the buyer and there she goes.

Sounds good so far. The day goes by and several sales are made and it’s now time to go home. Once at home, you log in to your app and a whole new world opens up. Before this app, you tried but it was hard to keep these kinds of records.

Now everything is here. You know which items were sold, in what quantities, what cash was given and how much change was returned in each case. In fact you can even see the kind of cash people are more likely to bring in the morning versus in the evening and you plan the next day accordingly.

Again, in the past, you were just kind of selling and selling—and selling. You did not give much attention to which of the items you were selling were actually the most popular in the market.
At least you could not say for sure. With this app, the trends are clear.

Oranges are wildly popular and bananas are sluggish. In fact, it seems, you could make profit by focusing on selling exclusively oranges and dumping bananas. Several weeks later, you wake up one day and you do not feel like going to work. You are sick or something.

You see a loitering man in the street, teach him a thing or two about the app and, there he goes. However, in this case, you want to be careful. You do not want this guy going deeper into the app and, for instance, seeing how much money you are making in a month.

“So you restrict him only to the selling functions of the app,” Mohanoe said.

Off he goes. At lunch, you are still on your bed but you want to know how he is doing. No, you do not call him. You just log into your app and you find that he has just sold a dozen oranges. If it were you, you could have already sold two to three bags by now.

You ring him, “pull up your socks dude!” Mahanoe says he credits his supervisor, Seforo Mohlalisi, both for raising this idea in his final year project at the NUL and for supervising him through it all.

Own Correspondent