Find the part built for your side of the trade
A retailer wants to restock and keep their margin. A wholesaler wants to stop chasing orders. A driver wants transparent pay. A municipality wants to see which businesses are actually licensed.
Restock without losing a sale to a dead network
You are the customer. You buy from a wholesaler you already know, and you want three things: the price before you commit, the stock to actually be there, and a way to pay that works in your market.
- Live catalogues from verified wholesalers — see stock and price before you commit
- Orders complete offline; they sync when signal returns
- Set your own target margin per line and see your real profit
- Cash on delivery, card, EFT, mobile money and the ZArka wallet
- Direct WhatsApp order to your wholesaler without leaving the app
- Compliance tracker that tells you exactly which licence step you're on
Stock-outs, not competition
Informal retailers run about 8% out of stock — roughly 4% of annual turnover. About 27% of shoppers defect to another store after one empty shelf.
Live stock visibility is the single highest-value thing a retailer can have. It is also the thing a notebook cannot do.
Compliance is the gate, not the penalty
The DSBD Spaza Shop Support Fund offers R100,000 per applicant as a 50/50 grant-and-loan. Eligibility requires bulk buying, a POS system, digital literacy and credit health — all four trackable in software.
Stop being the phone tree
Ninety-five percent of surveyed independent traders buy from wholesalers. That makes you the node the entire market hangs off — and it usually means your catalogue lives in a WhatsApp group and your stock lives in someone's head.
- Publish a catalogue once; every retailer sees the same truth
- Import supplier price lists by CSV with AI-assisted parsing of pack sizes and variants
- Bulk product image search with verify-before-save — no unverified images go live
- Sell-through tracking, forecasting and reorder suggestions
- An order desk that shows exactly what to pick, pack and dispatch
- Settlement via B2B banking or ZArka, not a week of reconciliation
Last mile decides your margin
Transport is about 59% of South Africa's logistics cost, and a township collection trip runs R300–R350. ThengaDrop costs delivery per corridor instead of estimating it nationally.
A wholesaler can scale order volume into a spaza shop only if the delivery economics close. That is why delivery is a first-class part of the platform, not an afterthought.
Transparent pay, verified delivery
If the payout is unclear, you leave. THENGA shows the task, the route, the fare and the total earned — and settles the delivery on a QR scan rather than a signature argument.
- Gig-linked deliveries generated by real retailer orders
- Task notification and route instruction in one view
- QR-verified proof of delivery — no disputes on handover
- Real-time earnings visibility and a payout history
- Standalone courier and taxi work, not only platform orders
Power is a business risk
Research on South African informal traders found 64% have stopped trading at some point because of load shedding, 66% shed jobs, and the average monthly revenue loss exceeds R11,000.
KasieConnect and ThengaDrop are part of the same problem set: keeping a shop open and a delivery running when the grid and the network do not cooperate.
See which businesses are actually licensed
Economic development mandates depend on knowing who is trading, who is licensed, and who is funding-ready. Today that knowledge sits in filing cabinets and WhatsApp groups.
- Registration, permit and licence status at corridor level
- Funding-readiness scored against real programme criteria
- Economic activity reporting for LED and IDP planning
- Evidence of bulk-buying, POS and digital-literacy capability
Where applicants fall out
Of roughly 82,000 shops that registered for the Spaza Shop Support Fund: about 44,696 were verified, around 15,000 reached a trading permit, and 2,369 were approved — roughly R179.6 million released.
The break is at municipal licensing and stock records. Software that tracks those steps is a direct lever on the funnel.
An 18-month pilot, with the arithmetic shown
Tengar is seeking a single facility to fund an 18-month pilot: 100 spaza shops, 10 wholesalers and 50 drivers across a defined corridor, with growth released against milestones.
We publish the assumptions, the operating budget and the break-even point rather than a growth curve with no denominator.