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Friday, March 29, 2024

Qarabao aims to lift MSMEs

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About 99.6 percent of the 1.39 million registered Filipino businesses in the Philippines are micro, small and medium enterprises and many proprietors struggle to keep their businesses alive and encounter trouble scaling up efficiently and effectively. 

Whether they have disorganized inventory systems, inefficient processing methods and simply don’t have enough time in their workday to take care of orders, many small business owners believe that only large enterprises can afford to have digital and productivity tools that would help their businesses thrive. 

Recognizing that these needs should be addressed, three young marketing, technology and product experts banded together to create Qarabao (www.qarabao.com), a web application that would help do the heavy lifting for small businesses, with the mobile app version coming soon.

Qarabao aims to lift MSMEs
Qarabao founders (from left) Michael Tiongson, Cookie Enriquez and Roy Patrick Nepomuceno

After months of talking to Filipino business owners from different industries about their concerns and needs, the Qarabao founders and their specialized team of programmers, customer service managers, content creators and UI/UX designers developed an online ecosystem to un-complicate the lives of entrepreneurs by optimizing key business processes in three easy steps.

These steps include presenting accurate and organized inventory 24/7; helping create and track orders and manage customer details; and providing the setup for streamlined systems for ordering and receiving payments.

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“We found that many Filipinos are intimidated by the idea of even starting a business. We want to change this and empower every Filipino to follow their business dreams. We built Qarabao so that more Filipino entrepreneurs would have access to innovative tools that would help build their businesses which in turn would be a boon to our country’s economy,” said Michael Tiongson, the chief executive of Qarabao.

Qarabao currently supports multiple payment channels: credit or debit card, online payments, bank deposit or transfer, over-the-counter payments through partners such as PayPal, PayMaya and Coins.ph and with cash on delivery soon to follow. Fully integrated shipping options will soon include Lalamove, Shippo, Fleet.ph. Further down the line, Zoom Courier, Xpost will also be integrated onto the platform. 

After a little more than a year in development which included three months of beta testing and detailed customer feedback, Qarabao officially launched on June 27, with the founders secure in their goal of being able to simplify the processes that come with managing businesses everyday. Roy Patrick Nepomuceno, the chief technology officer said it was important :that we built a system that would be easy for Filipinos with no tech background to learn to use and trust.”

“From the get-go, we aimed to challenge the idea that learning to optimize your business would include a steep learning curve—so when you experience Qarabao, you’ll see that it’s tidy, timely, and convenient for the business owners to use and so reliable that their customers will keep coming back,” he said.

Qarabao is launching its standard plan for P490 a month which includes inventory tracking, order management, multiple payment channels, shipping management, customer relationship management and reports and analytics. 

Cookie Enriquez, the product manager, said it only costs P16 a day to use Qarabao. “We also have zero transaction fees, which means that we do not take from the sales earnings of the business owner.” 

“In the coming months, we will release new plans that include campaign management, e-commerce chatbot and website services. Many customers have been asking for a point-of-sale system, so that’s in Qarabao’s development pipeline as well,” she said.

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