Your Shop and Your Website Are Two Different Businesses

If you sell from a counter and you also sell online, you are running two businesses that share stock, badly.

You sell three items across the counter and the website still lists them as available. Someone buys one online and whoever is minding the shop has no way of knowing it has gone. At closing you sit with a notebook on one side and a dashboard on the other, working out which number is wrong, and settling it by walking the shelves yourself.

Every merchant we work with has some version of this. The till and the website are different systems that were never introduced to each other. Nothing you can do at either end fixes that, because the problem is the gap between them.

Today Paylo runs both ends. The counter and the storefront now read from the same stock count.

What I found when I ordered from a mall

A few weeks ago I ordered from a mall near me, on purpose, to watch how it worked.

Someone sat by a phone waiting for messages. I sent mine. They walked the store looking for what I wanted, photographed it, and sent me the picture to confirm. Then they took it to the checkout and rang it up exactly as they would have if I had been standing there myself, against the same inventory system, so the stock moved correctly and the sale was recorded properly. They photographed the bill, sent me an account number, and I paid into it.

That's the errand model. It's a decent system, but it breaks the moment anything is unusual: the item is out of stock, they're not sure which variant you meant, or you cannot remember the name of that cream you bought last time and only know the tin was blue. A two-minute order becomes thirty minutes of back and forth while an attendant walks the aisles fetching your order one item at a time.

Where our merchants had a website and no till, this store had a till and no website, and a person was standing in the gap doing the work by hand. Every order from outside the building consumed someone for the length of the trip: reading the message, walking the aisles, photographing, waiting for a reply, going to the checkout, sending an account number, watching for the transfer, confirming.

The bigger cost is the basket. Researchers at Cornell looked at nearly two million shopping trips and found that even a full online store, with pictures and categories and a search bar, produces a narrower basket than walking the aisles does. People buy what they came for and less of everything else.

Now take away the pictures, the categories and the search bar, and leave the customer with a text box. They are not browsing at all. They are reciting a list from memory. Whatever they forgot, and whatever they would have noticed on a shelf, is revenue that never existed.

One stock count, both counters

Paylo already built the website side. The till is the piece we were missing.

Sell something across the counter and it comes off the website. Sell something on the website and it comes off the shelf count the cashier sees. There is nothing to reconcile at closing because there was never a second list.

For a store like that mall, it means a customer can open the app, see what is actually on the shelf right now, browse it the way they would walk an aisle, order and pay. No message thread, no account number, no photograph of a bill. The order arrives itemised and already deducted from stock. For our existing merchants it means the shop finally exists inside the system they were already using.

Paylo POS, for shops with a counter and staff

Paylo POS is a standalone app running on a phone or tablet you already have. You do not buy a terminal, lease anything or wait for a delivery. Install it, sign in, and the device is your till.

A device signed into Paylo POS becomes a terminal bound to your store, with its own Terminal ID and a key held in the phone's Secure Enclave, the same hardware protection behind Face ID and stored cards. It stays that terminal until you reset it. Opening the till is a glance: Face ID first, PIN only if that fails. Resetting a forgotten PIN needs your Paylo account password, so somebody holding the phone cannot change it without the credentials behind the account.

Staff get added at the counter rather than by email. Most systems send an invitation to a work address, which assumes your cashier has one and checks it, and in a Nigerian supermarket that assumption is usually wrong. Instead you add a team member in Paylo Business, the paired till picks it up and shows their name, and they set their own PIN on the device with your approval, standing there.

Every sale on that terminal carries the cashier's name. That is not there to police your staff. It is there for the moment a number looks wrong, so you can check the record instead of suspecting people. You will find it all under Team and Devices in your Paylo Business account: who has access, which devices are signed in, what you have approved, and what each person has done.

If you run the shop yourself, you are not left out

You do not need a second app or a second device. Paylo Business has POS built in. Switch it on for the day on whichever phone sits by the counter and that phone is your till.

It is the same problem when you run the shop alone. You sell something at the counter, then forget it is still listed as available on your storefront. There is no cashier to catch it, only you. Turn POS on and the counter sale updates your storefront by itself, so the listing is never wrong.

Where we are starting

We are working closely with a small number of stores before opening this wider. If that is you, get in touch.