MANILA, Philippines — A new smartphone application was introduced for “sari-sari” stores or mini-stores in the country which sell prepaid cellphone load credits to their customers.
Called the SariLoad, the app was developed by Sari Software Solutions, a local company in the Philippines.
The company said SariLoad demonstrates a first-of-its-kind smartphone-based loading app for sari-sari stores.
A public demo of the app was made recently at the 2013 Globe National Convention which was attended by Globe Telecom’s load distributors and resellers from all over the Philippines.
SariLoad is designed to run on Android-based smartphones and comes packed with features that address the needs of sari-sari store owners. The app was first fielded to several sari-sari stores in a closed beta testing for a few months in order for Sari to gain real-world insights and learning.
During the SariLoad demo led by Sari’s CEO and founder Ibba Bernardo, user interface designer Philip Cheang, and product research manager Cristina del Rosario, it only took seconds to perform the task compared to the traditional methods which take a few minutes to sell load, thereby saving sari-sari store owners valuable time and allowing them to serve more customers.
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The app can also show how much the store is earning at any given time period.
Del Rosario highlighted the creation process for the SariLoad app which took into account all the suggestions of the sari-sari store owners who tested the app.
Del Rosario reiterated that such unique approach to software design has made the SariLoad app more usable for the typical sari-sari store owners who may not be familiar with smartphones.
Developed internally for more than a year, SariLoad will soon be made available to sari-sari store owners in the country.
