ICT & I Limited is Nigeria’s first Business Improvement Company.

Essentially, our slogan “Make More Money” summarizes what we do. We support you with savoir faire and technology to enhance your business profitability.

We do this by introducing structured business practices while leveraging the best of social media, manpower development, programming, latest technology equipment and ICT to your advantage all at unbelievably low costs.

Our work is to make your business
a) More effective
b) Reach wider audience
c) Serve Your Customers Better
d) Reduce waste, costs, errors and theft
e) And there by Increase Turnover and Profit


In this series we will be discussing proven ways to improve Supermarket/pharmacy/Boutique Inventory, Sales & Profit


Step 1: Save One Hour

Very successful businesses always shut their doors to the public at least one hour before they actually close. This permits staff to balance their accounts and supervisors and managers to do some checking before people go home. Our Shopmaxi software offers excellent close-of-day routines to help you maximize that one hour. You will gain 20% more of lost profit by doing this.

Step 2: Monitor Your Staff

As the CEO of a business or shop, you can carry out your investigations at any time. Let your Staff be on their toes, unable to know your next step. The keyword is check, check, check. Shopmaxi comes with plenty of check-ability stats (daily, monthly, weekly reports) that can give you an idea of staff to sack and which to promote. What goods will expire in 3 months time, so that you can reduce to clear. This increases your profits by over 50%.

Step 3: Get Small Change

Make an arrangement with your bank for small change and collect this every week in crisp new notes. This allows you to set your price N10, N5 less than the competitor. N4,990 looks much cheaper than N5,000, but is negligible. By having the right change, the myth remains unexploded, and the new notes makes everybody to feel good. Shop maxi's point-of-sales feature calculates and prints cash paid and change on every receipt so that you are not losing any money or price effects due to bad arithmetic on the part of your sales girl. This promotes sales and goodwill by about 50%.

Step 4: Count Your Stock

One big secret of very successful businesses, especially trading outlets, is that you must be ready to count stock, but thankfully, you can now contract it out. ICT&I provides a shop auditing service for a fee, and from there Shopmaxi takes over. Our new WizCount technology which uses barcoding makes life a lot easier. As you sell, it simply subtracts the items sold from the items bought to give you the stock on hand so that you can detect what is missing. This saves you heavily on lost stock and can increase your profit by 20%

Step 5: Reward Loyalty

Set up a reward system for loyal customers and tie it to their receipts.You can offer small gifts and publish the receipt numbers of 10 winners on your blackboard every week. This makes your customers to insist on their receipts. Shopmaxi works with all receipt printers to produce great looking numbered receipts, and comes with a great Customers Relationship Strategy that never forgets birthdays and anniversaries, and sends SMS messages to customers. This gives your shop more than 200% increase in profitability as customers refuse to move even when your competitor has a slightly better price.

Step 6: Barcode It

If you've done the first 5 steps, then very soon people will be queuing up to buy things from your shop (amen) and if you don't want them leaving because of mushy service, you need to buy into barcoding. This technology is an important breakthrough in stock taking and makes so much sense that you will wonder how you ever did anything without it. Take the example of Sure, a deodorant which comes in about 10 fragrances. When your staff sell, they just write “Sure Roll-on”. They never can tell you which particular fragrance they've sold. Imagine being able to sell at high speed and still identify different flavours of any product you are selling. Speed your sales by up to 100%. Shopmaxi applies the latest barcode technology to help you improve sales delivery and identify what fragrances or flavours of a product is really moving and which is not.

Step 7: Price it right

If you own a shop, two things will stand you out - Quality and Price. ICT&I helps you to determine selling prices for your items based on markets surveys. Shopmaxi will automatically suggest selling prices for most products once you enter the cost price, but you can override that.
Generally, you should do between 5-10% on fast moving goods and common provisions, and about 50-150% on electronics, clothes, jewelry, special toys, designers perfumes, exotic wines and other non-essential goods. Do a smart balance of quantity and price and your shop will be filled in no time. The law of price drops and demand increases is a recognized economics principle. Appropriate pricing will increase your turnover by over 200%.

Step 8: Hire Attractive People

Hiring polite and attractive staff will definitely boost your sales. You can provide a dress code or branded uniform as well as training on products so that staff can give wonderful advice to customers who need help. Create a product testing desk where small samples of a product like lipsticks can be tested. Most manufacturers now provide free mini- sized samples for this purpose. Encourage staff to smile sweetly and go the extra mile to satisfy customers. If a child accompanies a customer, permit staff the authority to offer a cheap wafer, toffee or some other palliative. Seize the opportunity to create a relationship and subtly collect data on parent and child, such as names and phone numbers. This can go into the Shopmaxi CRM, so that SMS can be sent to the customer on the child's birthday.

Step 9: Take it back

Have a favorable, friendly policy. If it's a supermarket, the products must not have a broken seal and must come back with a receipt within the hour or two. Permit exchange but limit refunds. Be very apologetic if the product is actually bad and replace it with a different brand altogether. If it's an electronics shop, try and rectify the fault or provide brief training. If it's fashion, once you've checked that there is no wear or sign of usage, let the customer exchange it for a new size, color or design. Set up some kind of procedure which requires a phone call to you, or confirmation by a supervisor. Always ask to speak to the customers directly, and always show that you care about how they feel. Remember that customers that you accept return goods from always return back. Shopmaxi provides an excellent return goods module which tracks the item by receipt number, reverses the sale and updates the inventory right back to where it should be.

Step 10: Advertise

If you have done all the things you should do and people are still not coming, then spice up your sales with an advert or promo. Shopmaxi comes with super calculator schemes like “Buy One Get One Free “ , “Buy two get 20% off the third item” and other promo options not found in any other shop packages.

To know more about Shopmaxi contact us through phone via 08033120866,08168609433 or through email: ictandiltd@gmail.com