How can PaygOps Customisable Features support solar water pumps and agri-services distributors?

One of the particularities of the revenue models of solar water pumps distributors is their need to be adapted to the farmers' context: in contrast to solar-home-systems and other products sold in installments, solar water pumps users’ capacity of repayment depends on the harvest periods. Therefore, these customers also expect additional services to complement the purchase of the water pump (for example: fertiliser bags).

PaygOps Customisable Features such as the Editable Offers and Add-ons, allow solar water pumps distributors to customise their commercial offers to better serve their customers by enabling them to adapt the terms of the contract and repayment periods to the context of the buyer; and by allowing them to modify the original contract of a client if additional products or services are purchased.

Editable Offers Feature

PaygOps allows distributors to create different types of contracts or Commercial Offers: a time-based subscription, a usage-based service or a rent-to-own (paid over time / loan) type of contract. In the paid over time type of offer, the terms of the contract can be customised depending on the repayment capabilities of the farmers:

• The base payment frequency can be adjusted to daily or monthly

• The date of the month that payments are expected to be made

• Initial down payment

• The reference pricing in 'time' and the reference pricing in 'money': this indicates the minimum amount of the payment that will be allowed to the customer and the number of days of activation (for PAYGO water pumps) that this payment will allow.

Example: Clean Agri Services* is a distributor selling PAYGO solar water pumps to smallholder farmers in Uganda. They want to offer their customers the possibility to pay the instalments every 90 days, at the end of the harvest periods when it would be more likely that the farmers will be able to contribute with larger repayments. But in the meantime, Clean Agri Services wants to make sure that the farmers will be capable of using the pump any day, without having to pay in order to get a code for the system to be activated.

With PaygOps’ Editable Offers, Clean Agri Services will be able to set up the Reference Time of repayment as 90 days, which means that every token generated upon the Reference of Payment will work for 90 days. The farmers will be able to do small contributions to the main payment whenever they can and if they pay even more of what is expected in the 90 days, the surplus may be considered as a contribution to the next payment. This is useful in cases in which solar water pumps owners rent their pump to other farmers during days that they are not using it, in order to collect some money that will help them repay the loan faster.

Customisable Add-ons

Distributors serving smallholder farmers usually provide a complete package of services to enable their customers to work and grow their crops in the best conditions. Besides the main contract - a water pump - distributors allow farmers to purchase seeds and fertilisers on credit, and thus are in need of a management system that can provide flexibility in the repayment model.

PaygOps Add-ons feature enables distributors to:

• Register the additional services and products that a potential client (prospect) may be interested in purchasing on top of the basic offer

• Register and link to the original contract additional services and products that a current client has purchased. The distributor can either modify the duration of the contract (extend it so that the farmer does not have to increase the amount of the instalment paid); or modify the amount to be paid in the installments and keep the same duration.

The Add-ons feature is also available in the mobile application, to allow field agents to work in offline areas, being able to associate add-ons to current customers or to prospects and having the ability to adjust the quantity according to clients' needs i.e.: number of bags when selling bag of maize or fertilisers during the onboarding process.

*This is a fictional company name, only used as a reference to illustrate the example

---

About Solaris Offgrid:

Solaris Offgrid supports distributors of essential services to build strong customer traction and greater relations with investors through flexible and inclusive Paygo solutions, designed for last-mile operations. Adopting a bottom up approach in the design of its solutions and creating synergies with a strong network of partners to solve last-mile challenges, the company has already deployed Paygo solutions in more than 30 countries through PaygOps, Solaris Offgrid in-house software solution built “In the Field, for the Field” and its product development services. Leading reference in the off-grid solar market, PaygOps is engineered to deliver modular and interoperable solutions to address off-grid energy access challenges and distribution complexity. For more information on PaygOps, please contact [email protected].