Peach Payments partners with Sukhiba for conversational commerce

Partnership opens up WhatsApp sales channel for merchants preparing for Black Friday

Digital payments service provider Peach Payments has integrated with Kenya’s conversational commerce and CRM platform Sukhiba to offer its South African merchants a new sales channel and facilitate WhatsApp-based sales.

Founded in 2021 by Ananth Raj Gudipati and Abhinav Reddy, Sukhiba is built on top of WhatsApp. Sukhiba is currently active in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Oman and India and is used by more than 35,000 SMEs dealing directly with manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors. At the end of August, Sukhiba announced a US$1.55 million seed extension funding round to expand across Africa and other emerging markets.

Says Peach Payments CEO and founder Rahul Jain, “Sukhiba’s technology lets merchants add their catalogues to WhatsApp and facilitates everything from product purchases to payments to scheduling deliveries. This partnership effectively utilises Peach Payments’ platform on WhatsApp, which opens up a new sales channel for our merchants in the run-up to Black Friday and that gives their customers the flexibility of paying by card, EFT, buy-now pay-later and other alternative payment methods.” 

Gudipati says, “We are confident that the deep knowledge and network that Peach Payments brings to this partnership will accelerate WhatsApp commerce and payments in South Africa.”

Jain believes merchants that have existing WhatsApp channels with customers will find the solution particularly helpful. “It provides a single way of dealing with all customer-related activities - sales, marketing, payments, deliveries, customer service, loyalty program and remarketing - 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.”

Merchants will also benefit from Peach Payments’ preferred partner status with Sukhiba through preferential pricing during the launch period. 

Gudipati says: “Sukhiba’s fee structure is usually based on both a monthly subscription fee and a per-transaction fee. This flexibility combined with Peach Payments’ deep knowledge of payments provides a solution that will accelerate chat commerce in South Africa. However, Peach Payments, as a preferred partner, has negotiated that its merchants pay only a monthly subscription fee, billed directly by Sukhiba. No per-transaction fee will be charged by Sukhiba for transactions processed via Peach Payments.”

Merchants sign up using the Sukhiba website and can monitor their sales on both the Sukhiba merchant app and their Peach Payments dashboard. For most merchants this will mean a daily reconciliation and transfer, while others may be on a weekly cycle.