Count the shelf in six minutes

Stapel is a stock count and wholesale ordering app for spaza and corner shops. Walk the shop with your phone, see what is short, and send the order to your cash-and-carry before you lock up.

Get started

What Stapel does

Four things, all of them on the phone already in your pocket. No till system, no laptop, no training week.

Count on the phone

Your shelf list comes up in the order you actually walk the shop — fridges first, then the dry goods, then the sweets by the till. Tap the number, move on.

Order what is short

Anything under the minimum you set lands on an order list by itself, priced off your last invoice from that wholesaler. Send it on WhatsApp or email without retyping a line.

See what actually sells

Twelve weeks of movement on every line. Stop buying the cooldrink that stands in the back and start buying two more cases of the one that goes on a Friday.

Works without signal

Counts save on the handset and go up when the data comes back. A dead tower or three hours of load-shedding does not stop the count or lose it.

Count on Monday, order on Tuesday

Most of the shops we work with count on a Monday morning, before the school crowd comes through. It takes one person and one phone: walk the fridges, walk the shelves, tap in what is there. A shop carrying three hundred lines is done in about six minutes, and the count sits on the handset until there is signal for it. By Tuesday the order is already written. Stapel measures the count against the minimum you set on each line, puts the short ones on a single list and prices them off your last invoice from that depot. You check it, change what you want, and send it — WhatsApp to the rep, email to the counter. Nobody sits at eleven at night with a pencil and the back of a Nestlé box any more.

Measured across 1 140 shops, March to July 2026

94% of stock counts finish in under six minutes, start to send.
88% of orders go through on the first send, with no follow-up call to the depot.
76% of shops run out of a top-fifty line less often by their third month on Stapel.
61% of shops that start on the free plan are still counting a year later.

In the shop

What shopkeepers tell us

I used to count on a Sunday night with a pen and I always forgot the fridge. Now my son does it on the phone in five minutes and the order is written by the time he is finished.

Nomsa Dlamini · Spaza owner · Khayelitsha

The depot in Epping used to phone me twice about every order. Since we started sending it off Stapel they just pack it and load it.

Riedwaan Abrahams · Corner shop · Mitchells Plain

Eleven cases of the same juice stood in my back room for four months. The twelve-week report showed me exactly why. I have not over-ordered on juice since.

Sipho Mahlangu · Owner · Mfuleni

My till packed up in June and I still counted and still ordered that week. That is the whole reason I keep paying for it.

Fatima Patel · Shop owner · Gqeberha

Count your shop this week.

Set-up is one call and about twenty minutes. We load your shelf list off your last three wholesaler invoices, so you are not typing product names on a Saturday afternoon.

Get started

Set-up takes one call, about twenty minutes. Leave your number and we will phone you back. Stapel · 141 Voortrekker Road, Bellville 7530 021 823 4106 · WhatsApp 072 118 4490 · hello@stapel.co.za