Rahul Jain, CEO of Peach Payments.

Peach Payments, a digital payments platform, has collaborated with Sukhiba, a Kenya-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, to facilitate WhatsApp-based sales to its South African merchants.

According to Peach Payments, utilising Sukhiba’s technology will enable merchants to add their catalogues to WhatsApp and facilitate sales and payments, and schedule deliveries.

Payments will be made through Peach Payments, giving customers flexible payment options, including paying by card, EFT and buy-now-pay-later.

Sukhiba was designed to work through WhatsApp, and is available in six African countries: South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Nigeria. In addition to operations in Oman and India, the service is used by more than 35 000 SMEs.

As a result of the partnership, Peach Payments’ merchant clients will pay a monthly subscription fee, rather than the additional per-transaction fee charged by Sukhiba.

Sukhiba says the partnership will accelerate chat or conversational commerce and payments in South Africa. The company added that for those merchants that already have existing WhatsApp customer channels, this will provide a useful tool to easily engage and transact.

Commenting on the partnership, Peach Payments CEO and co-founder Rahul Jain said: “It provides a single way of dealing with all customer-related activities – sales, marketing, payments, deliveries, customer service, loyalty program and re-marketing - on a platform consumers are already familiar with.

“For many companies, this is key, as their sales channels may currently be geared towards their websites, but their customers want to interact via WhatsApp; the most popular social media platform in South Africa, with a 94% penetration among the country’s internet users.”