South Africa's independent trade moves R465 billion a year through roughly 150,000 spaza-type stores — and most of it still runs on WhatsApp, cash and a school notebook. Tengar builds the digital layer for it: live catalogues, real stock, compliance that unlocks funding, and settlement that clears without a week of reconciliation.
Sources: Trade Intelligence informal FMCG (2023); Ipsos trader survey, 118 respondents (June 2024). Full sourcing on the market evidence page.
Formal independent trade in South Africa reached R268 billion in 2024, on top of an informal FMCG sector worth R197 billion. Ninety-five percent of surveyed independent traders buy their stock from wholesalers — which makes the wholesaler the load-bearing node in the whole structure.
And that node is invisible. Stock levels live in a notebook. Prices are agreed over the phone. A retailer's compliance status is a folder in a kitchen. When the government offers R500 million in support through the Spaza Shop Support Fund, most applicants never reach the funding stage — not because of ambition, but because of the paperwork ladder in front of it.
Informal retailers run roughly 8% out of stock — about 4% of annual turnover lost to empty shelves. Around 27% of shoppers defect to another store after a single stock-out.
Transport is about 59% of South Africa's logistics cost, and a single township collection trip runs R300–R350. A wholesaler cannot scale orders into a spaza shop if delivery economics don't close.
Mobile coverage reaches 92.2% of the population, but only 62.15% use mobile internet. Data costs (54.2 per 100) and handset affordability (43 per 100) are the real constraints.
Retailers order. Wholesalers publish stock. Drivers deliver. Everything reconciles — and it all keeps working when the network doesn't.
Browse live catalogues from verified wholesalers, build an order, and check out by card, EFT, mobile wallet or cash on delivery. Your cart and prices are stored locally, so an order never fails because the data dropped.
Publish a catalogue once and every retailer sees it. Import from supplier price lists with AI-assisted parsing, track sell-through, and settle without chasing.
Gig-linked deliveries with task notification, route instruction, QR proof of delivery and transparent earnings — including last-mile work generated by retailer orders.
A verified view of registered, licensed and funded businesses in your corridor — with the compliance status that funding programmes actually assess.
A spaza shop on a prepaid data bundle cannot lose a sale because a network call timed out. So Tengar writes locally first and synchronises second.
The local database is the source of truth for the user in front of it. Cloud sync — Firestore, with a Supabase fallback — reconciles in the background and resolves conflicts deterministically.
This is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a shop that can trade and a shop that can't when Vodacom has an outage.
A wholesaler publishes their catalogue. Products, variants, prices and pack sizes land in one place, and every retailer sees the same truth.
Browse, add to cart, check out. The order is written locally and synchronised — no network required.
The order desk shows what's to pick, pack and dispatch. Settlement runs through B2B banking or a ZAR-pegged wallet — not a week of reconciliation.
Delivery is task-linked, driver-verified by QR, and costed against the corridor rather than guessed.
The DSBD Spaza Shop Support Fund offers R100,000 per applicant as a 50/50 grant-and-loan, and it requires bulk buying, a POS system, digital literacy and credit health. That is precisely the ladder Tengar walks a shop through.
R100,000 per applicant, split 50% grant and 50% loan. Eligibility caps stock at R40,000 and assets at R50,000.
Bulk buying capability, a point-of-sale system, digital literacy, and credit health. All four are trackable in software.
Roughly R179.6 million released from 82,000 registrations. The funnel breaks at municipal licensing — which is why we start there.
Programme progress figures as reported publicly by DSBD. These are live programme figures, not Tengar results.
Whether you run a spaza shop, supply a thousand of them, deliver in a taxi, or fund and enable a corridor — there is a place for you in this.