Yoco enhances POS platform for small businesses in South Africa
South African payments tech start-up Yoco has launched an enhanced point of sale (POS) system for small businesses in the country. The cloud-based solution is being marketed as a package with the company's existing card readers, and enables retailers to organise stock as well as record and monitor sales in real time. Yoco is upgrading 14,000 business users to the system for free and providing the app to any new users who buy their card readers. It's also available through the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Payments service provider Yoco has launched an enhanced Point of Sale (POS) solution, which according to the company is South Africa's first 100% locally made, free point of sale app. It has been purpose-designed to give small and emerging businesses the tools they need to better run their businesses and grow.

Packaged as a bundled offering with the company’s card readers, the integrated POS solution will allow businesses to organise stock, ring up sales, do cash ups, recons and monitor their sales performance in real-time. The payments startup is upgrading its 14,000 current merchants to the Yoco Point of Sale at no cost, and is also making it available for free to any business that purchases a Yoco card reader, as of today.

In development for a year, Yoco says the new cloud-based solution was developed hand in hand with its existing merchants to ensure it meets their needs.

“We’ve been developing our new point of sale for over 18 months,” says Yoco CTO Lungisa Matshoba. “During the beta phase, we saw 55 merchants process over 200,000 transactions on the Yoco Point of Sale. The experience highlighted to us the impact Yoco Point of Sale can have on the growth potential of thousands of other small businesses, from hairdressers to restaurants to clothing stores, across the country. The more these businesses grow, the more South Africa grows with it.”

Says Yoco CEO Katlego Maphai: “We have made accepting payments easy for SMEs - our next natural step was to focus on making running a business easier. Our ultimate goal is to allow entrepreneurs to focus their attention on growth and customer engagement, and not the day-to-day tasks which can be streamlined through technology and data.”

The Yoco Store

Yoco Point of Sale was unveiled at the company’s recently launched retail store, the Yoco Store, in Parkhurst, Johannesburg.

The Yoco Store is where current and potential Yoco customers can explore and get expert advice on Yoco’s products and solutions, as well as those of its partner ecosystem, which includes cloud accounting service Xero and cloud point of sale solutions TabletPOS (powered by iKentoo) and Vend. The store is one of the first in the world for a point of sale payments company, is completely cashless and is powered by the company’s point of sale offering.

Yoco Point of Sale has started rolling out across the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. It will be available to all new and existing Yoco customers.