Wa-Faya is awesome but it doesn’t yet support Dial a Delivery

At the close of last month, Simbisa brands introduced the Wa-Faya voucher. These vouchers are a great initiative that closes a glaring gap in their line of services. You see, up until we had Wa-Faya it was hard for you to buy fast food for your family back in Zimbabwe if you were in the diaspora. Given how big and important the Zimbabwean diaspora is not targeting it was a mistake that Simbisa sorely needed to fix.

The not so flawless Wa-Faya experience

To test the service I went and bought a voucher for my wife using PayPal. Making the purchase was easy but here is something to note. You will be charged an additional $2 fee during the checkout process. The fee is probably meant to cover processing fees. It’s important to note that the fee is fixed so if you are buying a $10 voucher you pay $12 and if you are buying the $50 voucher you pay $52.

Buying the voucher was easy and confirmation was instantly sent to my phone. Once you have bought the voucher you have to assign it. You do this by selecting the country in which your beneficiary is located, their name as well as their phone number. When you do this the voucher is instantly delivered to the recipient’s phone via SMS.

Here is something to note. You can reassign a voucher to another number so if you make a mistake you can correct it. You can also resend the voucher via SMS if the recipient doesn’t get it for some reason.

Once I had done this my wife tried to make an order via Dial A Delivery since it was a Tuesday and she was craving pizza. Unfortunately despite what the Wa-Faya site says this is not yet possible. After placing an order and inserting the voucher in the notes section during checkout we got a call from the folks at Dial A Delivery. They were still in the process of integrating Wa-Faya into their app. This means that they were not yet accepting this voucher as payment. That was rather disappointing, to be honest.

Apparently, the voucher only works with in-store purchases at the moment. Eventually, we decided to take this route. We went to our local Chicken Inn to continue the test. The checkout process when in-store was flawless. The lady asked for our voucher number. She entered it in her POS, we got an SMS with an OTP in our phone, gave her the OTP and the order was paid for.

One big advantage of this voucher is that you are not forced to buy stuff you don’t need just so your purchase total is a round number. You buy what you want only and the change stays in your voucher. One other bug we found was that when you buy the voucher you are told it will expire on the day you buy it by the Wa-Faya system. That’s just a bug, Wa-Faya vouchers do not expire.

An overall pleasant experience despite the quirks

Despite all these quirks and bugs, the Wa-Faya voucher seems great. It will be even greater if Dial a Delivery is finally added.