Tapioca Delights has become the first Bank South Pacific (BSP) Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) to successfully launch a payment page on its website to access the Internet Payment Gateway (IPG).
Ginia Sialis, Owner and Director of Tapioca Delight, says they will now be able to capture a lot of business from overseas clients having missed a lot of international orders because of the difficulty in receiving payments.
“This eases payment process from customers overseas and in PNG, who are now able to generate and pay for their orders from our website with so much more convenience. TT and Western Union were too much of a hassle for us,” said Sialas.
Over the years, Tapioca Delight has grown their business to adapt to the payment preferences of their customers, from cash to EFTPoS, Mobile Banking, Internet Banking and now online through their website.
Tapioca Delight’s customers can now enjoy the convenience of paying online via their website 24/7 using a BSP Visa Debit Card or other banks Visa and Mastercard® cards.
From humble beginnings, Sialis started Tapioca Delight with K40 to purchase ingredients to make a tapioca cake, which she sold from a lunchbox when she was working full-time back in January, 2012. Sales from her desk at her workplace were so successful she left employment in 2013 to run the business full-time with her husband. Today Tapioca Delight is one of a number of successful family-run SME businesses in PNG.
Tapioca Delight started off with 2 to 5 orders a week. Today it receives 20+ orders per week with over 20 corporate clients and hundreds of orders from individual households in Port Moresby.
“We used our little kitchen oven to bake our cakes and would squeeze orders in our kitchen refrigerator and we had one staff – our haus-meri turned baker. As the orders increased, we got a commercial oven and a chiller in 2014. Today, we have a massive 4 deck oven, and the oven we bought in 2014 plus 4 chillers, 3 freezers and 5 industrial stainless-steel work benches. From one staff, we have grown to a staff of nine, seven (7) women and two (2) men,” Mrs Sialis proudly reflected on how far Tapioca Delight has come.
She encourages other SMEs to start small. “Use resources you have on hand to start your business and test the market. If you get a flood of requests and paying customers, you know you've struck gold, and then you can look at expansion. Once you're making an income from your business, exercise discipline with your money - give some (tithing and helping family and other people in need), save some, spend some. It's not about how much money you make, but how much you can save and invest to grow your business and help people.”
BSP says its e-commerce channel is an enabler for businesses, big or small, to sell goods or services via their websites.
“BSP is a part of our life story. Our growth as a business supports our local economy and helps employ and train women from our community," Sialis said.
With the ongoing COVID-29 pandemic Sialis said: “of recent times, social distancing and utilisation of digital banking is encouraged. The launch of the Tapioca Delight payment page is timely where orders and payments can be done at the comfort of people’s homes by a click and we get to have payment done straight to our account rather than handle cash.”
