Merchandising Software for Retail & Modern Trade Teams in South Africa

It can, and each account carries its own checklist and its own KPI weighting alongside that standard. A large hypermarket in Gauteng is scored across several aisles and shelf levels, while a small neighbourhood format on the same account gets a much shorter check. The app pulls the right version down by store, so nobody standing in the aisle has to work out which rules apply to that fascia.

In South Africa that is the entire reason to buy this. A full share-of-shelf audit runs down a supermarket aisle in the morning, and the same rep does a quick visibility check at a spaza counter in Khayelitsha or a trading stall near Warwick Junction that afternoon, on one device and one route. Each outlet carries its channel tag, receives the checklist written for it, and reports into a view where the two halves of the market sit next to each other.

Training runs off your own pack library together with the shelf templates each account uses, which is what lets it handle glare off a cooler door, packs half hidden behind others, photographs taken at an angle, and the mixed stacking you get wherever space is tight. When confidence is low the frame goes to a person rather than being passed or failed automatically, so no merchandiser is ever marked down on a guess.

One account scorecard: compliance against the agreed standard, end-cap and gondola builds delivered, share of shelf held, availability gaps, and signage still in place. Each of those figures opens onto the photograph behind it, with location and date attached. Where the buyer remembers a month differently to the way your team does, the evidence closes the conversation quickly and without heat.

They are. Every window is set up with its dates, the store it belongs to, the signage elements involved and the range that should be on it. The merchandiser photographs the build, checks it again mid-window and records the strip-down. Three things raise an exception: a display that never went up, one that came down early, and a paid siting where the agreed branding simply never appeared.

The gap is captured against the line and the store while the merchandiser is still standing there, then classified: stock sitting in the chain's own distribution centre, a shortfall from the distributor, replenishment that is simply too slow, or a line quietly delisted. On the independent side the same flag tells the van-sales or pre-sales rep that a spaza or a cash-and-carry has run dry and needs a call. Since the dashboards move daily, an account gap goes to the buyer that week rather than waiting for a quarterly review.

Each one is a scheduled campaign carrying its store list, its kit, an install window and the date it comes down again. The rep sees only the plan for the store in front of them, whether that is a chain branch in Pretoria or a run of tuck shops in Umlazi. Exception reporting picks up the outlets where December, Easter, back-to-school or Black Friday material never arrived, arrived damaged, or disappeared before the window had closed.

Yes, and offline is the normal state here rather than a fallback. Coverage disappears in the middle of a large store, thins out along rural stretches of the N1 and N2, and drops to almost nothing in parts of some townships. Photographs, audit checklists and availability records all complete on the handset with no connection at all, which keeps mobile data spend down as well. Everything uploads the moment a bar returns, and conflict rules stop the same call being written twice.

The model separates your packs from everyone else's in the same frame, and share is your facings measured against the whole category on that shelf. Trend lines run by account, province, category and individual store. That is usually how a brand team notices a competitor quietly widening its block in Western Cape supermarkets, or buying up counter space across township outlets, while there is still time to answer it.

Checklists and on-screen prompts can be presented so a field force working in English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans or Sesotho moves through a call without stopping to translate. A merchandiser on a township route in KwaZulu-Natal and a colleague covering chain accounts in Cape Town answer the same structured questions, and the answers, photographs and scores land in one comparable set of records.

Trade marketing follows rollout progress, signage installed, audit pass rates and how fast corrective actions are being closed out. Key account managers work from the per-account scorecard they will present at the next review. Whoever owns independent trade reads coverage and visibility by province and by corridor. Any figure opens downwards: national, then a province, then an account or a route, then one store and the dated photograph taken inside it.