Zoho Corporation launches Zakya

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. The Zakya brand offers a modern POS solution for retail stores to streamline their day-to-day operations and easily monitor them from one place. It provides robust capabilities for improved inventory management, omnichannel sales, and customer experience, and can be implemented in under an hour for businesses with thousands of items in their inventory.

"As consumers turn to online shopping, there is an increasing demand for digital solutions among retailers who want to stay competitive. However, the current solutions in the market either lack the necessary features to support retailers in their day-to-day operations or they are legacy software that are complex, rigid, and have a steep learning curve. Zakya bridges this gap by offering an easy-to-use solution that can be deployed quickly, lowering the barrier to technology adoption for small businesses," 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 that includes:

● POS billing application: The native billing app is available for Windows, iOS, and Android. The billing app also allows stores to bill uninterrupted even when used offline. During peak hours, sales personnel can use the mobile Zakya POS billing app to parallelly bill customers and shorten the checkout queue.

● Indian languages support: Zakya supports 10 Indian languages, such as Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati, apart from English.  

● Mobile store: Zakya enables businesses to launch a custom mobile app that allows their customers to browse and make purchases on their smartphones, and have the items delivered at home. Stores can also offer the option of in-store pickup.

● All-in-one admin console: With Zakya's web application, businesses can manage all of their back office operations—such as inventory management, customer details, transaction information, and vendor data—in one place, without having to switch between multiple apps or records.

● Business intelligence (BI) and data-driven insights: Businesses can gain real-time insights to enhance their store performance with the help of powerful reports for each operation such as inventory, sales, purchases, and more.

Third-party integrations: Zakya comes pre-integrated with payment partners, including Pine Labs, Razorpay, and PhonePe, to provide convenience to the customers and  store owners. Zakya can also be integrated with shipment solutions such as AfterShip and EasyPost to fulfil customer orders. Users will also be able to integrate with third-party applications to streamline their operations further. For example, with Twilio, stores can manage 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 helps businesses stay GST-compliant through its integration with accounting software, Zoho Books. With the Zoho Commerce integration, retailers can build and drive sales through their online store. These integrations can further be linked to the reports module to gauge real-time insights.

The Indian retail sector is expected to reach ~$2 trillion by 2032. To understand the needs of retail stores and businesses across India, Zakya surveyed over 1000 respondents. The survey revealed that 95% of the respondents who are currently billing manually would like to switch to a modern POS solution by 2029. The top three features these businesses seek in their POS solution are: ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and mobile billing.

As the retail sector expands, and India being the fourth largest market in the world, the digital needs of this segment will grow as well, specifically for small and medium businesses. Zakya has been curated to address the needs of this segment and empower these businesses to evolve with the landscape. Currently, Zakya's powers 170+ active stores in the country, in various places including Nagpur, Pune, Aurangabad, Bandhavgarh, Coimbatore, Tiruchirappalli, Nagercoil, and others.

The short implementation time allows stores to start using the POS system in an hour, and the ease of use allows them to train their employees quickly. As the retail segment has high employee churn, the shorter learning curve becomes a key factor driving Zakya's growth.

"We used three different software before Zakya, and each transition took almost 20 days, employee training took two to three days, and then a minimum of 40 or 50 customer bills to get accustomed to the software. With Zakya's seamless transition and user-friendly interface, training became unnecessary. Our employees started using it effortlessly from the moment of implementation," said Bharathi Kannan, Co-founder, Fresh Mills.