Zoho Expands Its Toolkit for SMBs

Zoho has expanded its tech portfolio for small and mid-sized businesses with improvements to its Bigin by Zoho CRM, Zoho Commerce, Zoho Solo, Zoho Contracts, Zoho Start, and Zoho Notebook solutions.

"Small businesses are expected to be nimble, high-performing despite limited resources, and adaptable to the frequently changing headwinds of business environments," said Raju Vegesna, Zoho's global chief evangelist, in a statement. "We have been delivering enterprise technology accessible to small businesses at consumer price points for three decades. As a technology partner, we keep businesses ahead by future-proofing them with advances in technologies through broad-ranging tools."

New capabilities to Bigin include built-in booking management and integrations with Quickbooks Online, Shopify, and more than 10 payment gateways, including Stripe and PayPal. The platform also now features on-device AI assistance for mobile apps, powered by Gemini Nano, Apple Intelligence, and Galaxy AI. It supports automated lead capture from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, WhatsApp CTWA, and Google Ads.

Several new Bigin capabilities will be rolling out in the coming months. They include the following:

• Integration with Zoho MCP, allowing users connect their Bigin account with LLMs like Claude to get contextual insights around their CRM data.
• Integration with Zia AgentStudio, allowing users to build custom AI agents for Bigin.
• Three prebuilt AI agents—Reply Assistant, Cross-sell Genie, and Churn Analyzer.
• AI-powered writing assistance, live translation, record summary, and quicker dashboard component creation, such as charts and KPIs.
• A refreshed iOS app that leverages Apple Intelligence for call transcripts and smart summary of daily tasks, events, and calls.
• A new Apple Watch app.

With the enhanced version of Zoho Commerce, businesses can now sell digital downloads along with physical products, manage loyalty point programs, and prevent revenue leakage by tracking and recovering cart abandonment. It also focuses on end-to-end order lifecycle management and workflow automation.

Additional key updates from Zoho Commerce include the following:

• More than 15 store templates for online store creation;
• Native mobile applications for iOS and Android phones;
• Social selling with multiple channels, including WhatsApp, that allows customers to view catalogs from business profiles, add items to cart, and automatically transition to the online store.
• Businesses can now manage quote requests and price negotiations and set credit limits.

Zoho Solo, for solopreneurs to perform essential business functions, such as client management, expense tracking, invoicing, payments, task management, and reporting, has been completely optimized for iPads and Android tablets and now supports timesheets, notes, reminders, mileage tracking, events, financial reports, and card scanning.

Zoho Contracts now includes an AI assistant to help with every stage of the contract process with self-service templates, automated approvals, online negotiations, and built-in e-signatures.

Additions to Zoho Contracts include the following:

• Deeper integration with Zoho CRM;
• Enhanced digital signature capabilities;
• Multi-organization support;
• Integration with ChatGPT; and
• Ability to manage counterparty-initiated contracts.

Zoho Start to help entrepreneurs launch a business, is now available in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., offers expedited filings in the nine states where processing takes longer, and lets users obtain a business domain and telephone number.

Zoho Notebook, the company's note-taking app, now provides shared workspaces for teams, projects, or departments, a whiteboard feature that includes not just text, but images, drawings, and shapes, and contextual integrations across the Zoho ecosystem, including CRM, Projects, and Mail.

Notebook AI, using Zia, Zoho's in-house AI engine, is now available within Zoho Notebook. Other new features include the following:

• AI Transcription, which automatically converts audio into structured, time-stamped notes with speaker labels and summaries.
• AI Mind Maps, which turns long notes into clean, visual mind maps.
• AI writing assistant , which summarizes, rewrites, fixes grammar, and changes tone across any note.
• AI-generated Smart Tags for organizing notes.
• Voice Search & Translation, to find and convert content across languages.