One of our core undertakings at Lipa Later is to offer a secure cost-effective payment solution to our Retail Partners (merchants), that will facilitate the development of long-term relationships with customers and add more value to them.

We developed the first version of The Hub (V1) back in 2019 as a point of sale (POS) value added service for our Partners. In simple terms, it’s a web- application used to enable and support their sales through the Lipa Later service and give them valuable insights as to what consumers are buying in monthly installments. All data collected by The Hub i.e. sale history, and customer’s item data is managed through a comprehensive software application that is accessible to various users within the merchant ecosystem via all web enabled devices. 

Some of the functionalities of The Hub V1 include the ability for our Retail Partners to:

1. Sell their items with Lipa Later to new and existing customers
2. Track and manage sales made with Lipa Later
3. Reconcile and invoice Lipa Later for sales made over a certain period
4. Create and generate sales reports that can be filtered to specific periods, or items
5. An information hub for customer insights such as average sales
6. Access a central application for Merchants with multiple stores 

One of the culture codes which we are proud to say we live by is version reloaded, which in simple terms means that we must always try to improve or create a better version of anything we work on, especially as times change. Our Tech, Product and Partner Success Teams therefore collaborated and developed a new version of The Hub, after sessions of design thinking with existing and prospect partners, as well as qualitative research.

So what’s new?

The Hub V2 officially launched on 22nd September 2021, and is now available for use by all Lipa Later Partners.

BEFORE: Homepage:

AFTER: Homepage:

BEFORE: Sales dashboard:

AFTER: Sales dashboard:

Some of the improvements include:

1. New clean look and feel. We have made significant improvements and redesigned user interfaces throughout the application
2. Additional functionalities e.g. a chatbot in- app to seek real-time support from customer support team, and FAQs within the application for speedy issue resolution
3. Faster performance, including a faster customer check out process that will take less than 3 minutes
4. Easy and customizable sales reports that can be generated from the application
5. Ability for the merchants to check customer limits for the purpose of upselling/ cross selling
6. Ability to accept top up requests by customers who can now shop for items that cost more than their credit limit by easily topping up the difference 

What does the future look like?

Our Team is still busy at work developing more upcoming features in the next release which will be announced soon, These include:

1. Automated invoicing
2. Merchant self onboarding and customer onboarding by merchants
3. Additional delivery options etc.

Stay tuned!

Want to partner with us? Find out more here https://lipalater.co.ke/partners/

 

Before you go… We are hiring!

Interested or know someone who would like to join our team?

The current openings include: 

Business Analyst, General Manager – New Markets, Country Manager – Nigeria, CFO, Collections Agents, Sales agents – Kenya and Nigeria, amongst many other open roles.

Check out the requirements on our website- http://54.195.58.147/careers/