Inventory software (point-of-sale systems, Zoho Inventory, the stock modules in mobile money apps) assumes barcodes, a till and someone typing every sale. Retail shelf-scanning AI exists, but it is sold to supermarket chains with robots and fixed cameras. Shelf Count brings the same idea to a 3 metre shop with no till: one phone photo each evening is the whole data entry, and the difference from yesterday's photo is the sales ledger.
Source: the owner's own shelf photos, one per evening, taken from the same spot (an on-screen outline helps line it up). Plus restocks the owner logs by tapping (or by photographing the supplier's delivery note), and their buy and sell prices, entered once.
How it is accessed: the phone camera inside the app. Counting runs first with a small on-device detector so it works offline; the photo is sent to a cloud vision model when there is data, for the products the small model is unsure about.
Limits and gaps: items hidden behind others can't be counted, so the owner is asked to keep one row facing forward, and stacked goods are estimated from the visible face times depth (shown as "about"). Sales and theft or spoilage look the same in the numbers. Loose goods (sugar scooped from a sack, tomatoes by the heap) need a weekly manual count. Product recognition needs about three photos to learn a shop's range.
Fallback: when a count looks wrong, the owner fixes it with + and minus, which also trains the shop's own model.
Give every small shop the stock control of a supermarket chain, for the price of a photo. Know what sells, what is running out and what you actually earned, without typing a thing.
About $0.05 per day per shop: on-device detection is free, cloud identification of 20 to 40 uncertain crops costs about $0.03, and the summary and supplier message about $0.01. WhatsApp business messages cost a few cents in most markets.
Free: one shelf, nightly counts, sales and low stock. Paid ($3 a month, or a supplier pays): unlimited shelves, supplier ordering, weekly profit reports and loan-ready monthly statements.
Every reorder message goes to a supplier who serves 200 other shops. Suppliers love getting clean orders the night before, so they recommend the app to every shop on their route, and some pay for it to win loyalty.