How to Set Up Your Provision Store in Gazeloft (Step by Step)

The pain: a shop full of goods and a head full of guesses

Walk into any provision store in Lagos, Kano, Accra or Nairobi and you will see the same picture. Shelves packed with indomie, milk, sugar, detergent and drinks. A busy owner who can tell you the price of every single item from memory. And a notebook, or no notebook at all, where sales are supposed to be written down.

Ask that owner one simple question: how much profit did you make last week? Most cannot answer. Not because they are careless, but because the tools they have were never built for the way a shelf-based shop actually works. Goods come in by the carton, go out by the sachet, prices change every time the supplier changes his own price, and money enters as cash, transfer and "I will pay you on Friday."

Gazeloft's Retail shop family was built for exactly this shop. Provision stores, supermarkets, pharmacies, boutiques and similar shelf-based businesses all run on one retail engine, so the experience is the same solid machine underneath while each vertical keeps its own framing. Setting it up takes one quiet evening. This article walks you through it.

What you are setting up

A retail space in Gazeloft gives you four things from day one:

1. A cart-based point of sale, so one customer buying seven items is one sale, not seven scribbles.
2. A product list with stock levels and weighted-average cost, so your margin is honest even when supplier prices move.
3. Payment tracking across cash, transfer and credit, including debtors who pay in parts.
4. Shelf insights: eight cards that read your last 365 days of movement and tell you what to reorder, what is expiring, what is dead and who stopped coming.

Everything works offline. Sales you record without network sit safely in an outbox and sync automatically when data returns, with no double entries.

Step by step: setting up in the app

1. Download Gazeloft on Android or iOS and create your free account. No card is needed. The free plan gives you a full 30-day trial with one space.
2. Tap Create Space and choose the retail type that matches your shop: provision store, supermarket, pharmacy, boutique or the closest fit. They all run on the same engine, so do not overthink it. Pick the one that sounds like your shop.
3. Name the space after your shop, for example "Mama Chidi Provisions", and pick your currency. Gazeloft supports multiple currencies and more than 20 languages, so set it to what your customers actually pay in.
4. Add your first products. For each product enter the name, selling price, cost price and the quantity currently on the shelf. If the product has a barcode, scan it now so future sales are one beep away.
5. Do not try to enter all 400 products in one night. Start with your top 20 to 30 fastest movers: indomie, sugar, milk, drinks, soap, whatever leaves your shelf daily. Add the slow items gradually as they sell or as you restock them.
6. Record your first sale using the cart. Tap the products, adjust quantities, take payment as cash, transfer or credit, and save. That first sale is the moment the shop stops being a guess.

Step by step: setting up on the web dashboard

The web dashboard at gazeloft.com mirrors the app and is often faster for the heavy lifting of setup, because typing product lists on a keyboard beats typing on a phone.

1. Log in with the same account. Your space and everything in it syncs across app and web.
2. Open your retail space and go to the products area. Add products with name, cost, price and opening stock, exactly as in the app.
3. Use the web dashboard for the long product list and the phone for daily selling at the counter. Many owners settle into exactly that split.

A worked example: Mama Chidi's first evening

Mama Chidi runs a provision store in Surulere. On setup night she adds her top sellers:

• Indomie carton bought at ₦11,500, containing 40 sachets. She sells sachets at ₦350 each, so she enters the sachet as the product, cost ₦287.50 per sachet, price ₦350, stock 120 sachets (three cartons).
• Peak milk tin, cost ₦380, price ₦450, stock 48 tins.
• St. Louis sugar, cost ₦900, price ₦1,100, stock 30 packs.
• Coke 50cl, cost ₦230, price ₦300, stock 60 bottles.

Total time: about 45 minutes for 25 products. The next morning a customer buys 4 sachets of indomie, 1 tin of milk and 2 bottles of Coke. One cart, one sale: ₦1,400 + ₦450 + ₦600 = ₦2,450, paid by transfer. Gazeloft records the sale, drops the stock, and quietly notes the profit on that basket: ₦2,450 revenue against ₦1,610 cost, a margin of ₦840. Mama Chidi did nothing extra. The records simply happened while she sold.

By the end of week one she can open the dashboard and see total sales, total profit and which products carried the week. That is the answer to the question she could never answer before.

Tips and pitfalls

• Enter cost prices honestly. Your profit figures are only as true as the costs you enter. If you cannot remember an old cost, use your most recent supplier invoice.
• Sell in the unit you actually sell. If customers buy sachets, the product is a sachet, not a carton. Divide the carton cost by the number of sachets.
• Do not fear an imperfect stock count. Gazeloft warns when recorded stock runs out but never blocks the sale, because the shelf is the truth and the record catches up. Start with your best estimate.
• Turn on daily record reminders so the app nudges you to close the day. A shop record is a habit before it is a report.
• Use backdating if you started selling before you started recording. Every entry form has a date field, so Monday's forgotten sales can still be entered on Tuesday under Monday's date.

Start tonight

One evening of setup buys you every future week of clarity. Create your shop space, add your top 30 products and ring up tomorrow's first sale properly. Stop guessing. Start seeing, at gazeloft.com.