Sila

Sila is connected commerce infrastructure. It links four groups that already trade with each other every day — suppliers, merchants, consumers and delivery companies — inside one environment where the store’s operations, its purchasing from suppliers, its sales to consumers and its delivery arrangements all run on the same data.

Sila is not a delivery application and not only a point of sale. Point of sale is the operational entry point: it is the system the merchant actually opens every morning, and it is where product, inventory, pricing and sales data are created. Everything else in the ecosystem — supplier ordering, supplier intelligence, consumer discovery, delivery selection — is built on top of that operational core.

The commercial position is deliberate: zero commission on the merchant’s core sales. The platform earns from subscriptions, supplier commercial services, advertising, analytics and delivery participation, not from taxing the merchant’s primary business.

Local commerce operates as a chain of disconnected relationships. The supplier sells to the merchant and loses sight of the goods immediately. The merchant runs sales on a basic register or on paper and reorders from memory. The consumer has no reliable way of knowing what a nearby store actually has. The delivery company is contacted case by case.

Each link works, and the chain as a whole performs badly. Suppliers plan production and distribution without knowing what is selling and where. Merchants carry the wrong stock and discover shortages when a customer asks. Promotions are launched without any way to measure their effect at the point of sale. Delivery is priced without competition.

Existing digital solutions have mostly attacked one link — usually consumer delivery — and financed themselves by taking a commission from the merchant’s sales. That model raises the merchant’s cost of doing business without improving how the merchant actually operates.

Sila starts where the merchant’s day starts: the point of sale. The merchant manages products, prices, inventory, sales, returns, expenses and multi-branch operations inside the platform. That produces the operational data everything else depends on.

From the same system the merchant orders directly from suppliers. The supplier receives structured orders, manages a catalogue, publishes offers, runs campaigns and places banners — and receives aggregated, permission-based intelligence about how products move in the market.

On the demand side, consumers discover nearby stores and services, browse, order, pay — including through dynamic QR payment requests generated at the point of sale — choose a delivery option from competing carriers, and track the order. Every layer runs on the merchant’s live catalogue and stock rather than on a separate copy that has to be synchronised.

Sila targets a broad merchant base because the operational problem — sales, stock, purchasing and delivery — is common across retail categories.

Two workflows run in parallel: the merchant’s upstream supply cycle and the consumer’s downstream purchase cycle. Both write to the same catalogue and stock.

Because Sila operates the point of sale, it observes commerce at the moment it happens — not at the moment goods are shipped. This is the platform’s strategic data position, and it is the basis of supplier intelligence.

Suppliers receive aggregated, permission-based indicators about how their goods perform in the market: total quantities, geographic areas, movement speed, fast-moving and slow-moving items, stock approaching depletion, products approaching expiry where such data is available, demand trends and reordering patterns.

The boundary is explicit and architectural: a supplier never sees an identified individual merchant’s data without that merchant’s authorisation. Insight is delivered at market or area level, aggregation thresholds are enforced, and each merchant controls what may be shared. Privacy by design is what makes the merchant willing to participate — and without merchant participation there is no supplier intelligence at all.

For Palestine, we recommend preserving zero commission on core merchant sales and building revenue on the supply side and on services. Concretely: a low merchant subscription with a free entry tier, a premium POS tier for multi-branch and advanced reporting, and supplier-side revenue as the main engine — subscriptions, advertising, sponsored placement, campaigns and analytics.

The reasoning is that the merchant is the scarce resource. Merchant density is what creates consumer coverage, supplier interest and delivery volume, so pricing must be designed to acquire merchants aggressively rather than to extract from them. Suppliers and brands, by contrast, already spend on trade marketing and distribution intelligence and are willing to pay for measurable reach and market signal.

Delivery should be monetised through a revenue share with carriers on platform-originated jobs, not through a consumer surcharge — this keeps the delivery market competitive, which is the feature that benefits both consumer and merchant. Financial-services partnerships and white-label deployments are later-stage options once transaction density exists.

The Palestinian retail sector is dominated by independent merchants and small chains with thin margins, high sensitivity to commission-based models, and low current penetration of integrated point-of-sale and supplier ordering systems. Suppliers and importers operate distribution networks with limited visibility beyond delivery. Delivery capacity exists but is fragmented across companies without a common commercial channel.

Adoption drivers: the operational usefulness of the point of sale, resistance to sales commissions, supplier appetite for market signal, and consumer demand for reliable local ordering. Market barriers: digital readiness among small merchants, hardware and connectivity constraints, price sensitivity, cash-dominant payment behaviour, and the effort required to build merchant density city by city.

The practical entry strategy is geographic rather than national: reach merchant density in one city, attract the suppliers serving that city, then activate consumer and delivery layers where coverage is already real.

Sila’s network effect is geographic and compounding. Each merchant that joins in a city increases the catalogue depth available to consumers there; better consumer coverage increases order volume; higher order volume makes the city commercially attractive to delivery companies, which improves price and speed; and improved delivery increases consumer usage again.

A parallel loop runs on the supply side: more merchants ordering through the platform makes supplier participation more valuable, and more suppliers on the platform means better prices, offers and availability for merchants. As merchant density rises, the aggregated market signal becomes statistically meaningful — which is precisely when supplier analytics turns from a feature into a product worth paying for.