

With regards to scaling, the challenge is getting locals to assist with business development. For example, if a company wants to run a survey, we can allow them to use our users as respondents at a fee,” said Magwape. So we can go to people who provide education services and say, get access to all these users and then we make money from our partners who want to access these users for their service. “So for example, through our edtech platform, we have 1500 users.
WHATSAPP CHATBOT FREE
But basically, it’s bite-sized learning and the idea was to not bore people with long lessons when they can take it bit by bit,” added Magwape.Īll the products are free for end users and Meeticks makes its money by availing its audience to potential advertisers, most of whom are corporates. We ran an education campaign on plastic waste but it could be education about new products for corporates. From those bite-sized learnings, we think it’s easier for people to get basic information. The third product is an edtech chatbot which delivers bytesized lessons to users. The second product is what Bashanganyi Magwape, co-founder of Meeticks Africa, calls “Google Forms over WhatsApp.” It allows the creation of multiple forms over Whatsapp, from customer support, customer feedback, to basic forms for data entry. The first one is an ecommerce marketplace that connects consumers to vendors and suppliers. Meeticks Africa is a suite of three products, all utilising the WhatsApp chatbot API. To address this challenge, we rely on the merchants to actually market the product to the customers and though the technique has not caught on like wildfire, it has proven to be effective,” said Mkhaliphi. “Marketing is a big expense for us at the moment, because we are bootstrapping and don’t have any funders or anything like that. However, getting the word out about the chatbot has proven to be a challenge for Fivvio Pay. But now we are actually integrated into Uber such that we can scale much more easily across the country,” added Mkhaliphi.Īdditionally, Fivvo Pay has integrated ChatGPT to make it easier for customers to place orders through automation or “quick checkout”, providing much needed convenience. And then they would run it and then we just use our platform for them to get orders and deliver them. “To address the delivery problem, what we had to do, with every township that we go to, would be to get guys who have motorbikes, bicycles, and form a delivery company for them. To address the challenge of making deliveries in townships, where last mile delivery logistics can be a nightmare, Fivvo Pay has partnered with Uber to simplify this process.

The chatbot has the ability to integrate with Shopify, allowing store owners to seamlessly avail their store inventory on Whatsapp through a simple plugin. “We’ve been operational for close to a year and up to date, we’ve transacted a volume of transactions amounting to over R700,000,” said Bruce Mkhaliphi, founder of Fivvio Pay. The service seeks to automate the sales process for township businesses. Fivvo Payįivvo Pay is a chatbot commerce solution that enables entrepreneurs to sell and market their businesses to ever-growing users on messaging platforms. TechCabal spoke to developers of four of these chatbots to find out more about their decision to build them, the traction they have garnered, their uses cases and much more. The trend has seen a couple of interesting use cases being put into the market. It is this combination of factors that have made some developers in the region gravitate towards creating WhatsApp chatbots instead of, say, mobile apps. With 23 million users in 2021, it is predicted that user numbers will hit nearly 28 million by 2026. According to statistics, as of 2020, 96% of internet users in the country use WhatsApp, making the channel the most popular social media platform in South Africa. In South Africa, the trend is no different. Whatsapp is without a doubt the most popular app on the continent, a title it has achieved due to its low data usage and ability to be supported even on the cheapest smartphones. One area which is showing the huge potential of chatbots is WhatsApp. Previously relegated to assistants on business websites, ChatGPT has shown that chatbots can do much more.

The rise in popularity of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-powered conversational chatbot, has brought much attention to the capabilities of chatbots.
