What We Shipped Since July: Marii Cards, Marii Tables and More

In July we told you we had been quiet because we were building, and we introduced Marii Tickets. Then we went quiet again. This time we were not fixing invoicing. We were shipping two products that do not look like anything Marii has done before, and getting two apps through the App Store and Google Play.

Here is what changed, in the order it happened.

Marii Cards: your change, kept for you.

Change is an everyday problem. The till is short of coins, the customer is owed seventy cents, and a sweet changes hands instead. Marii Cards is our answer, and it is the first Marii product built for the customer rather than the business.

When a shop on Marii owes you change and has none, the cashier saves it as credit on a card in that shop's name. Your phone gets a text and a notification the moment it lands. Next time you are in, you show one code and spend it. Only you can spend it, and it can only be spent at the shop that gave it.

The app went live on the App Store and Google Play in September. Since then it has picked up a card PIN, a lost-card block that stops a card at every till at once, specials from the shops you choose to hear from, stamp cards and cashback, and room for the loyalty cards you already carry from other shops. It is free, and you sign in with the number the till already has for you.

Marii Cards for customers → · Marii Cards for shops →

Marii Tables: your front of house, from the first booking to the last table.

Marii Tables started with a single steakhouse and a Friday night problem: the phone ringing at seven, calls going unanswered, and two parties booked onto the same table. Now guests book themselves at table.marii.app/yourvenue and are confirmed straight away, with no phone call. The same page takes collection orders paid by EcoCash, InnBucks, O'mari or card, and sells tickets to the venue's next event.

At the door, one tablet running the door app downloaded from Google Play shows tonight's bookings, the walk-ins and the floor, with birthdays and allergies already on the booking. It keeps working when the Wi-Fi drops. At the table, a QR card shows the menu, tonight's special and the name of the waiter walking over, and the waiter still takes the order.

Marii Tables →

Marii Tickets, now part of the table

Tickets did not stand still either. A venue's Tables page now sells tickets to its own nights, live from Marii Tickets, so a guest who scanned for the menu can buy a seat for Friday without leaving the page. For organisers the deal is unchanged: 3% per ticket you sell, nothing on the ones you don't, and the money settles through your own gateway.

How Marii Tickets works →

What did not change

Marii is still the system a Zimbabwean business runs on: the store, the invoices, ZIMRA fiscalisation, payments into your own bank account, customers, expenses. Everything above plugs into that. A shop that keeps its customers' change on Marii Cards sees it in the same dashboard as its invoices. A restaurant on Marii Tables runs its collection orders through the same payments. None of it asks you to start again somewhere else.

What is next

Over the coming weeks we will go through each of these properly on the Marii Facebook page, one product at a time, and we will write the longer guides here. If you run a shop or a restaurant and want to see any of it in your own room, ten minutes on the phone is usually enough: +263 78 295 8724.