For grocery shops, kirana stores and pharmacies

You are not a call centre. You run a shop.

Every day the same three questions. Is this in stock. What does it cost. Are you open. Each one takes a minute. A hundred of them takes your whole afternoon, and you are supposed to be running the shop.

This page shows exactly what a helper does for a shop like yours, and what it does not.

A shopkeeper's phone filling with unanswered messages A phone shows six unread messages at nine in the evening. Beside it, four customer questions sit unanswered, each marked with a red dot. 9:04 pm 6 unread Amul butter hai? Atta ka rate? Sunday open? Same order please ...and two more
Six messages, none answered. Two of them were ready to buy.

What your evening looks like

You shut the shutter at nine. The messages do not stop at nine. By the time you look at your phone the next morning, some of those customers have already bought from somebody who replied.

The frustrating part is that you knew every answer. The stock was there. The price was on your list. You were just asleep.

  • → A minute a message, a hundred messages a day
  • → The ones that arrive after closing get no reply at all
  • → Regular customers re-type the same order every week

What changes

The same questions still arrive. They just get answered, from your own stock list and your own prices, whatever the hour.

When somebody wants their usual order, it already knows what that is. When somebody asks something your list does not cover, it says so and passes it to you, rather than making up an answer that costs you a customer.

The part that matters: it never invents stock you do not have. A wrong "yes, we have it" brings somebody to your shop for nothing, and you lose them for good.

The same messages, now answered automatically Two customer questions receive immediate answers with stock and price. A third, about delivery, is not in the shop's list, so it is passed to the owner instead of guessed. Amul butter hai? Yes, 100g and 500g. 500g is Rs 285 today. Same order please Atta, oil, dal. Shall I confirm? Deliver to Sector 12? Not in my list \u2014 passed to you
It answers what it knows, and hands you what it does not.

“But I don’t have any documents”

You do. You just do not call them documents. Every one of these already answers questions you get asked out loud, and all of them can be searched instead of remembered.

Everyday shop paperwork becoming searchable Five kinds of paperwork a shop already keeps - supplier price lists, GST invoices, expiry and batch records, warranty cards and medicine leaflets - feed down into a search box that answers a question in plain words, citing the invoice it came from. Supplier price lists GST invoices Expiry records Warranty cards Medicine leaflets What did we pay for 5kg atta last month? Rs 212 per bag, 14 March invoice. Shown with the page it came from. You keep the paperwork exactly as you keep it now. Nothing to re-type, nothing new to learn. Figures shown are an example, not a promise.
Paper you already keep, turned into something you can ask questions of.

Questions it answers for you

What did this supplier charge last time. Which batch expires first. Is this item still under warranty. What is on the leaflet for this medicine.

Questions it answers for customers

Is it in stock. What does it cost. Are you open. Do you have the bigger pack. Can I repeat my last order.

What it will not do

It will not count your stock. It answers from the list you give it. If your list says you have it and the shelf is empty, it will say you have it.

It will not replace you. Regulars who want to talk to you will still talk to you. It handles the repeated questions, not the relationships.

It will not guess. Ask it something your list does not cover and it says so, then passes the question to you.

Any figures about results are marked [TO CONFIRM] until we have measured them properly for a shop like yours. We would rather show you a gap than a number you cannot check.

Try it before you decide anything

Open the helper and ask it the questions your customers actually ask. If it looks useful for your shop, tell us what you stock and we will set it up on your own price list.

Try the helper → Tell us about my shop Email us instead

Different trade? See the other seven.