The returns engine · isiZulu buya — to come back

Own the customer.
Keep the return.

Buya is the neutral engine that sits under your POS and does the one thing that grows a shop: brings customers back. Your app, your customer list, your margins — not an aggregator's 30–40% cut.

Cross-POS · Yoco · GAAP · SumUp POPIA-first Built on Cloudflare

Not "members spend more." Proof, measured against a withheld control.

Where Buya sits

The merchant stack is a layer cake. Everyone fights over the wrong layer.

Payments got commoditised. POS got commoditised. The layer that decides whether a business grows — will this customer come back, and what brings them? — is still up for grabs. Buya lives there, neutral to the rails below it.

L4
Consumer relationship
Aggregators — the enemy
L3
Returns & intelligence — bring the customer back
← Buya
L2
POS & back-office
GAAP · Foodics · Dyner
L1
Payments & rail
Yoco · iKhokha · SumUp

Every incumbent's loyalty is single-POS and single-tenant by design — Yoco locks data to Yoco, Square to Square. Buya is the layer that resolves one customer across those rails and pools intelligence across merchants. A 190-player landscape scan found that intersection empty.

Two products · one engine

Take the finished app, or take the raw engine.

Same neutral core underneath: events in — a sale, an identify, an order, a redeem — intelligence out. Points, churn, next-best-offer, forecasts, and the incrementality receipt.

01 · Done-for-you

Branded app + Merchant Centre

For merchants with no app of their own

Your own loyalty + order-ahead app, branded to you — the programme name, the points word, your colours, your menu — plus a Merchant Centre to run it. Self-serve setup in under five minutes; nothing to build.

  • Loyalty, order-ahead, rewards, live orders board
  • Your brand, your customer list — exportable, yours to keep
  • A named, white-label concierge (your "Naledi") built in
  • Incrementality & customer intelligence in the Centre

02 · Headless

The engine, as an API

For businesses that already have a till or an app

Just the engine — identity, loyalty ledger, intelligence, incrementality — behind a clean API and POS connectors. Yoco is connector #1; the engine is not Yoco-locked. Keep your own front end, plug in the returns layer.

  • Cross-POS identity resolution
  • Guarded points ledger — no double-spend
  • score() seam: churn · CLV · next-best-offer
  • Holdout & incrementality endpoints (ISS / iROAS)

Why Buya, honestly

A coupon app measures opens. Buya measures money it caused.

Incrementality, not vanity

Every "members spend more" claim is selection bias — your best customers join loyalty anyway. Buya withholds a random holdout from day one, so the gap between exposed and held-back is a causal number. We report ISS (incremental same-store sales) and iROAS — proven extra sales per rand of loyalty cost — per campaign, so you kill what doesn't pay and double the winners.

Neutral & cross-POS

One customer resolved across Yoco, GAAP and SumUp. You're never locked to a till vendor, and switching POS never orphans your customer graph.

Anti-aggregator

No fat commission on orders — that's the model Buya is built against. A flat subscription, your customers, your margin. The aggregator rents you your own regulars.

The consumer graph

One portable Buya identity across every place a customer returns to — with explicit, POPIA-first consent. A cross-merchant view no single-shop loyalty app can build.

A concierge that removes the decision

Like Checkers' Pixie, but on a cross-merchant graph and incrementality-native. Your own named assistant learns each regular's usual, reads the occasion — Soweto derby, Saturday 20:45 — and lines up the order for a one-tap yes. Every nudge is measured against the holdout, so you know it caused the sale.

"Your usual Mogodu + a Castle, lined up for the derby?" — Naledi

Pricing · proposed & adjustable

Priced at the value of the sales we prove — not per order.

Flat monthly software. No commission on your orders, ever. A merchant watching a holdout prove ~R20k/month of incremental sales doesn't haggle over the subscription.

Starter

R990–1,500 /mo

Café · spaza · small pub. App + loyalty + a basic Centre.

  • Branded app + loyalty
  • Order-ahead
  • Basic Merchant Centre
  • One location
Start setup

Multi-site

~R2,000/location

Groups · chains · franchises. Per-location or a negotiated platform fee.

  • Everything in Growth
  • Per-location rollups
  • Group-level benchmarks
  • Priority support
Talk to us

Headless / API

Usage· licence

You have your own app or till. Licence the engine and connectors.

  • Full engine API
  • POS connectors
  • Identity + intelligence
  • Incrementality endpoints
Get API access

Tiers are proposed and adjustable. One-time onboarding fee often waived to close a pilot. Prices in ZAR, excl. VAT.

Node 1 is the first live, paying merchant.

Be a merchant your customers come back to.

Set up your branded app + Merchant Centre in under five minutes — or talk to us about the headless engine. Built one merchant, one catchment at a time, proven with a receipt.