Nigeria’s retail industry is experiencing a new turn of innovation as home grown software company, Appzone, recently launched Tradeport, a first of its kind business automation solution to serve micro, small and medium retail businesses across the country.
TradePort is a unique IT solution for Micro, Small, and Medium retail businesses which combines retail business automation functionality (for in-store operations) with a flexible, user customisable web store front, both linked to the same stock and inventory management system.
“This state of the art technology was created as a response to the challenges faced by Small Medium, and Micro retailers. It provides convenient, effective and reliable end-to-end automation of all their business activities thereby increasing productivity and reducing cost,” said Appzone’s spokesperson, at the launch of the solution in Lagos recently.
The company revealed that Tradeport is also integrated to payment systems and preferred banks of merchants to enable online banking and seamless electronic payment. The in-store component of the solution integrates seamlessly to a wide variety of traditional as well as new low cost payment terminals to aid the spread of card payment acceptance amongst small and micro businesses.
According to it, the web store front comes pre-integrated to online payment gateways to enable retail merchants accept payments from cardholders of the major local and International card schemes such as MasterCard, Visa, China Union Pay, Verve, and others without having to go through any stress or technicalities.
The TradePort web storefront solution offers merchants the opportunity to own a website and sell their products via this website at no extra cost. This merchant website, once activated, is integrated to the back office solution and directly impacts on the merchant’s inventory and financial accounting.
Key features of Tradeport include core sales process automation and inventory management, automated financial accounting and IFRS compliant reporting, flexible user-customizable web store front complete with payment gateway and courier service provider integration, Bank account management and electronic payment and many more.
Continuing, AppZone’s spokesperson added that those who adopt the Tradeport solution “enjoy numerous benefits such as real-time, anywhere visibility and monitoring of operations, improved customer reach through access to previously unreachable online customers, access to world class technology at low initial and on-going cost, enhanced control and tracking of product pricing, sales, and cash collections and ability to achieve low cost and seamless card payment acceptance.”
By integrating directly to payment terminals and linking sales orders to payment transactions, TradePort affords retail merchants easy reconciliation of card payments and helps them trace each successful payment to its corresponding credit entry in the Bank statement. Tradeport allows business owners effectively manage their businesses from anywhere they are with devices as small as their mobile phones.
JUMOKE AKIYODE
