TallOrder, a South African POS solutions supplier plans to expand into Europe and US post funding
TallOrder, a provider of superior cloud-based point of sale (POS) solutions for the small and medium-sized organisation (SME) sector, received US $3.1 million in investment in January and is now looking to expand to Europe and the United States (US).
TallOrder POS, which can be used on Windows, iOS, and Android smartphones, was launched in 2014 and integrates with prominent payment platforms such as SnapScan, Zapper, MasterPass, Yoco, ThumbzUp, MTN MoMo, Innervation, African Resonance, NetCash, DPO, and PayFast.
TallOrder is a cloud-based solution that can be used by retailers, service companies, and hospitality businesses in Africa. The cloud-based solution is ideal for SMEs who may not have the time or resources to deal with internet security, on- and offsite backups, disaster recovery, and keeping software, databases, and integrations up to date. TallOrder has created an offering for the hotel and guest house business for the international market.
“Our solutions are all conceived, designed and developed locally, with specific industry knowledge and expertise in mind. This is the foundation we use to meet specific business needs with greater power, speed, cost-effectiveness and ease of use – all underpinned with a top-class range of ongoing maintenance and support offerings,” Anna Groenewald, COO and co-founder of TallOrder, told as per reports.
Groenewald worked in the special investigations branch of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and the medical campus division of the University of Stellenbosch before moving into the digital industry and accepting a position at chat commerce business Clickatell.
She and Dana Buys founded TallOrder, then known as CloudOne.mobi, in 2014, because they were excited by the possibilities that technology opened up.
Since founding his first firm while studying at the University of Cape Town in the early 1980s, Buys has successfully founded and sold a number of software enterprises. As a result, as a hospitality company owner – notably as co-owner of Vrede en Lust Wine Estate, among other things – he felt unhappy with low levels of technology, particularly in the area of point-of-sale (POS). TallOrder is the answer.
“In order to design cloud solutions that operate optimally, one needs to take the local context into account. We noticed that there was a need for cloud-based POS solutions in the SME market in Africa and developing countries. Many legacy systems make use of outdated technology that is often too costly for small businesses in Africa,” said Groenewald.
“In addition, Africa’s internet is notoriously slow, unreliable and expensive, and therefore cloud solutions created by more developed markets don’t always work as well as they’re intended over here. The local landscape demands robust offline processing capacity and the POS system must be able to be isolated from the speed and availability of the underlying internet, which we factored into our product design.”
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 epidemic has expedited the transition from on-premise, LAN-based systems to cloud-based solutions that can be administered from anywhere. TallOrder has benefited from this.