Most small food businesses around Hartbeespoort sell the same way. Someone sends a WhatsApp. You reply with what is in the freezer. They ask a price. You work out a total. They send a proof of payment. You check the bank. It works, and it eats your afternoon.

Fresh Folio is a husband-and-wife kitchen in Skeerpoort. Guido and Leandri cook, freeze and pack everything themselves — meals, pies, jellies, nougat, gift boxes.

Their orders came in on WhatsApp, one conversation at a time.

What we built them

Andrea, on our technical side, built a shop into their website. The catalogue, a basket, a checkout, and their Yoco payment system wired onto the end of it so an order can be paid for on the spot rather than arranged afterwards.

The part that matters is what it did not do. It did not replace WhatsApp. It sits next to it.

A customer can browse the shop and pay there. Or they can send a WhatsApp and have exactly the conversation they have always had. Or start in one and finish in the other — look at the photographs and prices on the site, then message to ask whether the cranberry jelly suits what they are cooking on Sunday.

Nobody has to change how they like to buy.

Two doors instead of one

There are two kinds of customer in every small business. One of them wants to talk to a human being. The other would rather do almost anything than message a stranger and sit there watching for the two blue ticks.

WhatsApp has always looked after the first one. The shop looks after the second. And plenty of people turn out to be both, depending on the day — happy to chat about a gift box for a mother-in-law, equally happy to quietly buy three pies and a bottle of pesto without speaking to anybody.

The kitchen is closed at nine on a Sunday night. The shop is not.

The market stand

Leandri had a stand made for the markets with a QR code on it, pointing at the website, the Google listing and WhatsApp.

So somebody who tastes a nougat on a Saturday morning can photograph the code, go home, and order on the Wednesday. Before that, it only happened if they remembered the name.

What we would take from it

Two things, and they apply to almost any small business.

Do not replace the thing that already works. WhatsApp was working for Fresh Folio, so the shop was built to stand next to it rather than argue with it.

And the payment is the whole thing. A shop that cannot take money is a catalogue.