Zoho Launches New Business Division Zakya To Offer POS Solutions To Retail Stores

Sridhar Vembu-led SaaS unicorn Zoho has launched a new business division, Zakya, in India, to cater to the retail businesses.

The Zakya brand offers a 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, Zoho said in a statement.

Commenting on the launch of the division, Zakya chief evangelist Jayagopal Theranikal told Inc42, “We want to focus on small and medium businesses to offer a solution that will help sustain their operations and also grow.”

Citing data from Invest India, Theranikal said that the Indian retail market is expected to grow at a 25% CAGR to reach a size of $1.1 Tn by 2027 and $2 Tn by 2032.

He said that about 90% of retail shops in the country are small and medium business and new businesses are continuously emerging. However, over 50% of store owners in India run their operations manually.

Moreover, the retail businesses which use POS still rely on outdated software, which can present technological constraints that limit scalability, he added. They don’t feel confident to move to new software due to a lack of guidance and technical knowledge. Zakya will fill that gap as well, Theranikal said.

Zoho said Zakya will help retail businesses with billing, accounting, ecommerce, mobile billing, mobile store, and back-office tasks. Besides English, Zakya supports 10 Indian languages – Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati.

Zakya also comes pre-integrated with payment partners like 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, the company claimed. Users will also be able to integrate with third-party applications to streamline their operations further.

The product is priced at INR 649 per month. Since its beta launch six months ago, Zoho said Zakya has onboarded 170+ active stores and 320+ active POS registers.

It is pertinent to note that Zoho cofounder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said last year that the company saw a 37% year-on-year growth in its revenue from India in calendar year 2022. Without giving the revenue number for India, Vembu said the country emerged as the fastest growing market for the SaaS giant.

Meanwhile, Zoho’s overall sales crossed the $1 Bn mark in the financial year ended March 31, 2023. The bootstrapped unicorn reported an operating revenue of INR 8,703.6 Cr ($1 Bn) in FY23, a jump of 30% from INR 6,710.7 Cr in FY22. Its net profit rose 3% to INR 2,836 Cr from INR 2,749 Cr in FY22.