Peach Payments, a South African digital payments service provider has partnered with Kenya’s Sukhiba, a conversational commerce and CRM platform to offer its South African merchants a new sales channel and facilitate WhatsApp-based sales.
Peach Payments expects this partnership to accelerate WhatsApp commerce and payments in South Africa.
According to Peach Payments CEO and founder Rahul Jain, “Sukhiba’s technology lets merchants add their catalogues to WhatsApp and facilitates everything from product purchases to payments to scheduling deliveries. This partnership effectively utilises Peach Payments’ platform on WhatsApp, which opens up a new sales channel for our merchants in the run-up to Black Friday and that gives their customers the flexibility of paying by card, EFT, buy-now pay-later and other alternative payment methods.”
Sukhiba will provide a single way of dealing with all customer-related activities – sales, marketing, payments, deliveries, customer service, loyalty program and remarketing. South Africa, with a 94% penetration among the country’s internet users and a rising number of WhatsApp users will see many companies take up Whatsapp as their sales channel. The partnership allows Peach Payments customers preferential pricing during the launch period.
Gudipati says: “Sukhiba’s fee structure is usually based on both a monthly subscription fee and a per-transaction fee. This flexibility combined with Peach Payments’ deep knowledge of payments provides a solution that will accelerate chat commerce in South Africa. However, Peach Payments, as a preferred partner, has negotiated that its merchants pay only a monthly subscription fee, billed directly by Sukhiba. No per-transaction fee will be charged by Sukhiba for transactions processed via Peach Payments.”
Merchants sign up using the Sukhiba website and can monitor their sales on both the Sukhiba merchant app and their Peach Payments dashboard. For most merchants this will mean a daily reconciliation and transfer, while others may be on a weekly cycle.
Founded in 2021 by Ananth Raj Gudipati and Abhinav Reddy, Sukhiba is built on top of WhatsApp and is currently active in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Oman and India and is used by more than 35,000 SMEs dealing directly with manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors. At the end of August, Sukhiba announced a US$1.55 million seed extension funding round to expand across Africa and other emerging markets.