A New Day for Yaha: Welcome to yaha.app

We named ourselves after the first thing we solved. A samosa shop with a line out the door and no way to take an order except standing in it. So we built a page, we called it an order page, and we called ourselves orderyaha.com. That was the right name for a food ordering tool.

It stopped being the right name a while ago.

Look at who's actually selling on Yaha right now. A fragrance shop. An iPhone reseller. A lighting store. An aquaculture business selling fish stock to other farmers. An artist selling original paintings. A fashion boutique. None of them are "ordering" in the sense the name implied, and none of them are restaurants. They're just shops, doing what shops do: taking money for things people want.

We were describing a fraction of the product with the whole name. So today we fix that. orderyaha.com is becoming yaha.app.

What actually changes

The core idea doesn't move: a real page for your business, live in minutes. That part stays exactly as it was.

What changes is what you're allowed to put on that page.

Yaha was built for menus. It's becoming a merchant app for anything a local business sells:

• Menus, for restaurants, cafes and takeaways, same as before
• Physical goods, for shops, boutiques and makers
• Event tickets, for anyone running a night, a class, a show
• Appointments, for anyone whose product is their time
• Digital products, for anyone selling a file instead of a thing

One page. One login. Whatever you sell, however you sell it.

Payments, in the room and out of it

The other piece we've been quietly building is how money actually moves.

Online, nothing changes for your customer: they order from your page, they pay, you get paid. But most small businesses don't only sell online. They sell across a counter, at a market stall, at the door of an event. So the app now takes payment in person too.

On supported devices, you can accept tap to pay directly on your phone. No card reader to buy, no separate terminal to charge and lose the charger for. Someone taps their card or their phone against yours, and it's done.

In eligible markets, we've also built M-Pesa push STK into checkout. Your customer gets the prompt on their phone, enters their PIN, and the order confirms. No manual till numbers, no "did that actually go through" back and forth.

Same app, same login, whether the sale happens on Instagram at midnight or across a counter at noon.

Why we're telling you this instead of just shipping it quietly

Because a rebrand is a promise, and promises deserve a reason.

The reason is that we watched the wrong businesses hesitate to sign up. An events promoter would land on orderyaha.com, read "order," and assume it wasn't for them. A boutique owner would see "menu" in every example and close the tab. We built something that could serve them from early on and then told them, through the name, that it couldn't.

That's on us, not on them. yaha.app is the correction.

What doesn't change

We're not becoming a different company. The thesis is the same one it's always been: every local business deserves to sell online without paying a tax on it. Free to start. A small cut only on what you actually sell. No monthly fee sitting on your books whether business is good or bad this month.

The pages still look like your shop, not like a template. If you've read <a href="/blog/the-order-page-is-the-product-not-the-dashboard">The Order Page Is the Product, Not the Dashboard</a>, that argument gets stronger with more categories, not weaker. A ticket page still has to feel like your event. An appointment page still has to feel like your studio. The dashboard was never the point.

And if you already sell food and this all sounds like it's for someone else, it isn't. Everything you have on Yaha today works exactly as it did yesterday. Table QR codes, pickup orders, your Google Business link. Nothing about your setup breaks. You just now sit inside a bigger app instead of a narrower one, which mostly matters for who else you'll meet in it.

Who this actually opens the door for

Think about the businesses that never fit "order online" in the first place:

A yoga instructor booking one-on-one sessions. A DJ selling tickets to a Friday night. A designer selling a digital pattern file. A tailor taking appointments for fittings. None of them were ever going to build a website for this. Most of them were choosing between three different apps to duct-tape together, or not selling online at all.

Now it's one page, one app, and if they also happen to run a market stall on Saturdays, the same tap to pay works there too.

What to do about it

If you're already on Yaha, nothing is required of you. Your page, your link, your customers, all unchanged.

If you've been sitting on the sidelines because your business didn't look like a restaurant, that was never actually the requirement. It's yaha.app/join now, and it takes about as long as it always did.

New name. Same reason we started: nobody should need a card, a contract, or a class in ecommerce just to sell what they make.