Sign up at app.caluchi.com with your name, email, phone and store name, then verify the code we email you. Your store activates immediately on the free Starter plan. Every business gets one 7-day free trial with full access to every feature — start it any time from Plans & billing. No card required.
Build your menu or catalog under Catalog: create categories, add products with prices, variants (sizes) and add-ons, and set stock levels. On Plus and up, let AI write appetising descriptions for you. Products marked out of stock are hidden from ordering automatically.
Every store gets an About page, Terms of service and a Privacy policy, already written and already live, under Store editor → Pages. The legal pages are a starting point, not legal advice. Read them and make them yours — they carry your shop's name, and your customers will read them as your promise. Your setup checklist will keep reminding you until you have edited them, which is deliberate: leaving our generic wording up under your name is not the same as having written it. About takes two pictures as well as text, and is worth spending time on. It is the page people open when they are deciding whether to order from a shop they have not used before. You can unpublish any of these without losing what you wrote, and reset one back to our original wording if an edit goes wrong.
Under Store editor → Brand you can set your own accent colour, text colour, fonts and corner style on top of whichever theme you have chosen. You get two fonts: one for headings and one for body text, from a list picked to stay readable at small sizes and to carry prices properly. Set only one and the other follows it, so you always get a pair that works together. Colours are checked before they save. If an accent is too pale to read as a button, or a text colour too light to read as body copy, you will be told and shown the measurement rather than finding out from a customer who could not use your shop. Your page background stays with the theme on purpose — it is the one setting that reliably makes a storefront unreadable, and it would look like our fault rather than your choice. Leave anything blank to use the theme's own value.
Connect WhatsApp and Telegram from Channels. Customers order in a guided chat; when AI is on (Plus and up) they can order in plain language — “2 jollof, no pepper” — and ask about the menu. Every order lands on the same live board as your other channels.
Every store gets a storefront at your-slug.caluchi.com. On Growth and up you can connect a custom domain and pick from the full theme catalogue. The store editor lets you reword every label and swap imagery without a developer.
Print a QR for each service point. Customers scan, browse your catalog with images, order and pay from their phone, and can call for service (water, the bill, and any buttons you configure in settings). You name your service points — dine-in, room service, pickup counter, whatever fits your business.
Upload an advert under Adverts: a picture, a short line of text, an optional link, and the dates it should run. It appears as a popup on your storefront home page for that window and stops on its own — you never have to remember to switch it off, which is how a finished sale ends up advertised for another three weeks. You can keep up to five and switch them on and off without deleting, so a seasonal advert can be reused next year. Only one shows at a time; the one highest in your list wins when several are live. A customer who dismisses an advert with “Don't show me again” will not see THAT advert again — but a new one still reaches them, so a fresh campaign is never silently suppressed. Give every advert a short line of text as well as the picture: it is what people read when the image is slow to load, and what a screen reader announces. On Plus and up, the rewrite button will tighten your wording for you. It suggests; nothing changes until you accept it.
Give your agent a name and switch it on under Settings. From then on a customer can talk to your shop the way they would talk to your staff, and the agent does the work rather than reciting a menu.
Ordering in plain language. “2 jollof, no pepper, and a coke” is one message and one order. The agent picks the right products, asks only about the choices it genuinely needs — size, spice, add-ons — and reads the whole order back with the total before anything is placed. Nothing is submitted until the customer says yes.
Pictures, not just words. Ask what something looks like and the agent sends the actual product photo with the price, rather than describing it.
Changing their mind. Items can be added or removed mid-conversation, and the customer can ask to see the basket at any point. They do not have to start again because they forgot the drinks.
“The same as last time.” A returning customer can reorder in one message. The agent can also pull up their past orders when they ask what they had.
Their details, kept current. A customer can correct their name or add a new delivery address in the chat, and it is saved to their account — so the next order does not ask again.
Discount codes. If a customer has a code, the agent applies it and says what it took off. It will not invent one: a code that does not exist is a customer who believes they were promised money off. If a code is refused, the agent says why — expired, wrong minimum, not for that item.
Checkout. When they are ready the agent sends a checkout link for whichever payment methods you have enabled, and the order lands on the same live board as every other channel.
It answers questions from your catalogue and your knowledge base, and nothing else. Ask it something you have not written down and it says it is not certain and offers to check — which matters most for allergens and anything about safety.
The free plan takes bank transfer, cash and POS (paid in person). On Growth and up, connect your own Paystack, Stripe, Flutterwave, Opay or Monnify account under Payments — you bring your keys, money settles to you directly, and paid orders confirm automatically by webhook. NGN settles through Paystack; other currencies through Stripe.
Orders from all channels appear on one board. Move them through your workflow, route to stations, and assign a driver. Confirm bank-transfer and cash payments with one tap. Analytics roll up revenue, order mix and top items.
Define delivery zones and fees under Delivery. Assign a rider to an order and watch it to the door with live tracking. Customers get a tracking link.
Set your hours per day under Settings. You can split a day if you close for the afternoon, and you can set a closing time past midnight for late trading — a bar open until 2am is handled properly rather than reading as shut all evening. One-off dates are separate from the weekly pattern, so closing for a public holiday does not mean editing Monday and remembering to change it back. Your hours show on your storefront and your AI agent can answer “are you open?” without being told each time. There is an optional setting to stop accepting orders outside your hours. It is off by default, because plenty of shops are happy to collect orders overnight and start on them in the morning. Switch it on and checkout is blocked while you are closed, with a message you write. QR ordering at a service point is never blocked — someone scanning at your table is standing in your shop. Everything runs on YOUR local time, taken from the country in your business settings.
Your agent answers customers from your product descriptions. The knowledge base is where you add everything else it should know — delivery areas, returns, parking, allergen handling, which days you take cash only — and, just as importantly, how it should behave: the tone to use, what it must never promise, and when to fetch a person instead of answering.
Start from a template. Browse Templates from the knowledge page for ready-written topics covering the questions almost every shop is asked, plus ones written for your kind of business. They arrive already carrying your shop's name and trade; everything still in [square brackets] is a detail only you know. Read one, add it, then rewrite it in your own words — a template is a draft, never an answer, and an agent quoting a placeholder to a customer is worse than one that says it does not know.
One subject per topic. Up to 4,000 characters each. The limit is deliberate: a topic that runs to pages gets retrieved as one lump and crowds out everything else the agent knows, so if you are running out of room you almost certainly have two subjects rather than one.
Write it however you like. Plain paragraphs are fine. If you want structure, headings, bullet points and bold are understood — use Preview to see how a topic reads before you save it. Nothing is required.
Reading it back. The list shows every topic with the first line of what it says; View opens one to read in full without leaving the page. That is the job worth doing regularly — checking what your agent is telling customers is still true.
Switch a topic off to park it without losing it, and your agent stops answering from it immediately. Every change is recorded in your audit log — who wrote it, who switched it off, and when — because these topics are the script your agent speaks from.
If you ever leave the Plus plan your topics stay exactly where they are and you can still read and copy them.
An AI that answers everything confidently is worse than one that knows its limits. When a conversation reaches something your agent should not be handling — a refund, a complaint, an upset customer, or simply someone asking for a person — it stops, tells the customer a team member will help, and hands the conversation over.
The AI steps out. It does not keep replying alongside you. The conversation stays paused so a customer is never talking to a person and a machine at the same time. If nobody picks it up, the next message after a quiet period resumes the agent rather than leaving the customer with silence.
You are told three ways at once. In-app, so every store sees it whether or not they use Telegram — the bell opens the conversation. In your ops chat on Telegram or WhatsApp, if you have one connected. And both carry a one-tap link to message the customer directly, plus a link straight into the conversation in your dashboard.
Where you reply. Conversations in your dashboard shows every handover with its full transcript — everything the customer and the agent said, in order. Reply there and it goes out as your shop, on the channel the customer was already using. They do not have to move to email or start again.
Closing it. When it is dealt with, close the conversation and the chat goes back to the agent. The whole exchange stays in your history, so a repeat complaint from the same customer is not a mystery.
Teach it when to stop. Which situations should trigger a handover is yours to decide — write it as a knowledge topic. The templates include one for exactly this, covering the cases most shops want escalated: anything about illness or safety, disputed money, and anyone who has asked twice.
An order is not one thing that happens — it is accepted, prepared, made ready, and then served, collected or delivered. Workflows under Operations are where you describe those steps for your business, so the order board matches how your shop actually runs.
Start from a template. Pick the shape closest to your business — a kitchen preparing and serving on the premises, a counter preparing for collection, a shop packing for delivery — and adjust it. You are not building one from nothing.
Each step is a button. You choose what it says, so your staff tap “Out of the oven” rather than “Transition to state 3”. The same buttons appear in your Telegram ops chat, so an order can be moved without opening the dashboard.
Each step can message the customer. Write the line that goes out when an order is accepted, or ready, or on its way, and it is sent automatically on whichever channel they ordered through. That is the difference between a customer who waits calmly and one who messages you twice.
Who can do what. Every step names the roles allowed to take it — the kitchen can start preparing, only a manager can cancel. Staff see only the buttons they are allowed to press.
Changing it is safe. Each save creates a new version, and orders already in progress keep the version they started on. An order halfway through service will not lose its next step because you edited the workflow while it was cooking.
Add staff under Staff and assign roles (owner, manager, kitchen, rider, and more). The free plan includes 2 staff; Growth up to 20, Plus up to 50, Custom unlimited. Every staff member sets up at least one second factor (authenticator or passkey) for security.
Under your profile you can change your password and manage second factors — a TOTP authenticator app or a passkey. Sensitive changes (like connecting a payment gateway) ask you to re-verify a factor. The Privacy tab lets you export your data or delete your account.
Starter is free forever. Growth and Plus are self-serve — subscribe with a card and it renews automatically. Custom is invoiced for chains and large operators (contact sales). When a trial ends you drop back to the free plan until you subscribe.