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In a bid to provide seamless market for retailers, a tech company, Afiari has committed to create innovative solution to the retail market to enable businesses stay alive and grow.
According to co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Afiari, Chigozie Njoku, the innovative solution is to support businesses to sync their offline operations to online sales.
”We are creating a new market so in a way, we are making it easy for more businesses to stay alive. If we do that, then that means we have to be alive. In a nutshell, we are learning more about the needs of the market and we are creating for that to stay ahead.
“We initially worked on enabling retail stores to sell their products online but not long into that, we discovered the need to fully build the infrastructure that will enable them to sync their offline operations to online sales,” Njoku said.
The young entrepreneur explained that he and his co-founder, George Ebisike, a senior software engineer have built the infrastructure to handle all the operations of retail businesses and build exactly what works for their businesses.
His words: “We also plan to connect the solutions backward to the manufacturers of products so there is a straight line from manufacturing to point-of-sale or online sales allowing for product data to be shared across the whole supply chain.”
He explained that the retail sector is one of the sectors that have not seen significant technological progress, especially in Africa.
According to him, the solutions that exist today are either legacy solutions built on old technology like Ethernet, meaning that they can’t scale beyond their physical location since data cannot be accessed once you leave the location or they do not have open APIs for connecting to online platforms whether self-managed or platform managed.
“I started out my career at MTN Nigeria Foundation, where I worked as an Administrator then later worked as a monitoring and evaluation officer as well as project support/coordinator. It was while I was handling tasks such as purchasing, payment resolution, vendor engagement, office administration, invoicing, and many more, that I got the idea to start,” he said.
Speaking on the company’s future outlook, he said the goal is to have the digital infrastructure to aid seamless data communication from the manufacturers to the retailers which will continue to take time.
Njoku said: “This is an ambitious goal and we can’t do all of that in one day. So, we are taking it one product at a time. We will be launching a new product for automated invoicing soon which will help businesses collect invoice payments automatically and this is for installments and one-off payments.
“So, businesses can now know all the customers who are yet to pay them, and what they have left, and allow their customers to pay via their invoice link so that all payments are tracked, and get paid into their accounts.”
He explained that this is a perfect time for digital transformation of offline businesses in Nigeria.