India, 2024—Zoho Corporation, the parent company of leading technology brands ManageEngine, Zoho.com, TrainerCentral, and Qntrl, today announced the launch of a new brand in India: Zakya. Zakya, a modern POS solution, helps small and medium retail businesses streamline their day-to-day operations. Stores can implement Zakya and start billing in under an hour.

Zakya also announced the findings from a survey conducted in February, 2024, wherein 1040 businesses were surveyed to determine the level of POS adoption, usage, and impact on SMBs in the country. Only 39% of the respondents use a POS software for their billing operations, while 95% of the ones who don’t use POS, said they wanted to adopt it by 2029. Of the respondents who wanted to adopt the POS solution in the next five years, 75% of them said that the ease of using and managing the solution will be a key factor influencing the purchase decision.

“As the digital age takes over, retailers must invest in technology to stay competitive and provide an exceptional customer experience. The survey shows that POS software adoption is currently low in India, with only 39% of the respondents using a POS solution. The rest of them still rely on traditional operations like cash bills and spreadsheets. More often than not, businesses shy away from POS software because the current solutions in the market either do not have adequate features or they are complex to use. Zakya bridges this gap by offering an online, easy-to-use POS solution that can be implemented quickly, empowering smaller businesses to take the software live and start billing in under an hour,” said Jayagopal Theranikal, Chief Evangelist, Zakya.

The term “Zakya” is derived from the Sanskrit word “sakya,” which means “possible”. Built from the ground up in India, Zakya offers businesses an end-to-end modern POS setup, including a billing app that allows salespeople to start billing parallelly during peak hours from their mobile phones and reduce the queue. Store owners can also launch their own apps that will enable customers to buy from their mobile phones and have the items delivered to them or ready for an in-store pick up. Store owners can see all their information about sales and inventory from one or more stores in one place in the central admin console.

They can also gather insights using real-time analytics about transactions, inventory, etc. Zakya supports many Indian languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati.

Zakya comes pre-integrated with payment partners, including Pine Labs, Razorpay, and PhonePe, to provide convenience to the customers. It can be integrated with shipping partners like AfterShip and EasyPost to deliver customer orders. Integration with Twilio allows stores to send SMS notifications to customers, while the integration with WhatsApp allows users to send messages for invoices, sales orders, and payment receipts from the system directly. Zakya also integrates with other business apps, such as Zoho Books for accounting and Zoho Commerce for online stores. These integrations can further be linked to the reports module to gauge real-time insights.

As the retail sector expands, and India being the fourth largest market in the world, the digital needs of this industry will grow, specifically for small and medium businesses.Zakya has been curated to address the needs of the retail SMBs, from small single location stores to multi-store retailers. Currently, Zakya supports 170+ active stores in the country, in various places including Nagpur, Pune, Aurangabad, Bandhavgarh, Coimbatore, Tiruchirappalli, Nagercoil, and others.

Key findings from the Zakya survey

POS adoption is low but is rapidly gaining traction – Only 39% of the respondents use a POS software for their billing operations. Meanwhile, 48% of them still rely on manual operations like cash bills, and 13% of them use spreadsheets like Excel to manage their accounting and inventory management needs. Among those that don’t use POS software,

95% of them say they want to adopt a POS solution by 2029. In fact, 56% want to adopt in the next 6 months itself, showing the increasing needs for POS solutions.Businesses want a POS solution that is easy to use and manage – 75% of the businesses that want to adopt POS software by 2029 say that the ease of using and managing the solution will be a key factor that influences purchase decisions. The second and third top key features were “cost-effectiveness” and “mobile billing option”.

Businesses prefer POS software as their annual revenue increases – As businesses grow and their operations increase, they turn to POS software to establish clear processes and better manage operations.
Businesses that make less than 5cr as their annual revenue are highly reliant on traditional billing methods. Only 24% of them have deployed a POS software for their billing and operations. The rest 76% of these businesses still use cash bills, manual receipts, and inventory spreadsheets.

Among businesses with an annual revenue of 5-10cr, 55% use these traditional billing methods and spreadsheet tracking for inventory. On the other hand, 45% of the businesses use POS software.
48% of businesses with an annual revenue of 11-20cr use POS software to manage their billing and inventory management operations. Interestingly, among businesses that have an annual revenue of 21-50cr, only 26% still use manual billing methods and spreadsheets. Meanwhile, 74% of them already use POS software.

Businesses see increase in revenue after POS software adoption – When asked if the businesses saw an increase in revenue after POS adoption, 98% of them who use POS software said yes. Among the businesses who said yes, 37% of them stated that they saw a 20- 40% increase in their revenue, while another 27% say that they have seen a 40-60% increase.

POS software helps businesses save time – 67% of the businesses that use POS software say they easily save one to more than two hours a day after adopting the solution, showcasing how digital solutions help improve operational efficiency.