The festive season, wedding events and end-year company performance reviews are always full of gift vouchers, with the beneficiaries redeeming them in supermarkets and select retail shops.
Firms usually have to distribute the vouchers across the country to all their benefiting staff, which is a challenge. Redeeming them also poses some setbacks.
To redeem the voucher, one has to visit a specific supermarket within a specific period of time and spend the entire amount at once. If the voucher limit is breached, you have to top up with your own cash.
That is where Pamela Muriuki and the company she co-founded, Gift Pesa come in, seeking to send the paper gift voucher into oblivion through a revolutionary innovation, and making distribution and redemption of vouchers more flexible.
Her tech startup allows users to send an e-voucher from a laptop in any location directly into your phone with just a simple text message.
“What we realised is that corporates like insurance companies who want to reward their salespeople across the country would incur huge costs just sending the gift vouchers and redeeming was still a problem because some supermarkets were not in every location,” Ms Muriuki says.
Now with just the text message, you can redeem the electronic voucher in over 1,500 stores including all supermarkets, clothes stores, eateries and Shell filling stations.
Supermarkets such as Naivas, Carrefour, Quickmart, Eastmart, Hotpoint, Cleanshelf, Magunas, and Maathai accept the digital voucher.
One can also redeem GiftPesa vouchers at Shell Petrol stations, Java House, Artcaffe, Pizza Inn, Galitos, Inscor, Chicken in, Goodlife pharmacy, Amora, City walk, Lc Waikiki, Woolworths and Jade.
What’s more, you do not have to use the entire allocation of your e-gift and can spend part of it at different times.
GiftPesa is already attracting attention and pulling big corporates that promise to scale it into the mainstream.Safaricom included it among the first application on the new M-Pesa super app supporting its growth by giving it access to all its merchants with the telco’s payment platforms.Safaricom will also help the company scale to other markets across Africa with the company keeping a close eye on the massive Ethiopian population to gain a foothold in the regionThe core team has been invited to South Korea, a Sh1 billion daily person-to-person gifting market, for a benchmarking study that will help them roll out a similar product in Kenya this coming January.Ms Muriuki said they have been able to sign up all banks […]
