So tuseme you want “in” on this Internet thing. You’ve heard people make money online, and you want your share. Of course the first thing you should do is get yourself onto a computer and head over to this blog and read up on all the things you can do to make money online.
There are hundreds of things you can do to make money online. One of the easiest, most fulfilling and most intuitive ways of doing so it to sell something online. This is something that most people already understand – you’ve probably sold dozens of things in the offline world. Selling those same things (or others) online may be a new experience but it certainly is something you already understand.
What do you need to do to start making money online in Kenya by selling stuff online? I’d argue that you FIRST need to think hard about your business. Selling online is no different from selling anywhere else. Your business plan must make sense if you are to succeed. You must think realistically and sensibly about what you want to sell, where you will find it, how much you will sell for, how you will deliver it to customers and how you will market and advertise your new shop. This is the hard part.
Next, you should think about technical issues – i.e. find a way to set up an online shop. E-commerce technology has existed for years and there are lots and lots of options here. A sad note is that in Kenya, even very simple online shops will usually cost you at least Kshs 50,000/-. This is a bit high, of course, but it is justifiable given the complexities involved.
Of course this was true only up to last week. Last week DukaPress was launched. What is DukaPress? It is a tool that lets you start your own simple online shop in less than 15 minutes. Have you ever tried to get a blog over at WordPress.com? That’s how easy it is to get a DukaPress shop up and running.
Why DukaPress?
There are many other options to DukaPress (akina Magento, osCommerce, CubeCart, etc etc), so what makes DukaPress worth it? In my opinion, DukaPress is probably the simplest way to get a fully functional online duka. Take Magento, for example, it has a fantastic feature-list but actually setting up and running a Magento shop is a nightmare that is too much to bear for the average person.
How Easy Is DukaPress?
Have a look at this online shop. That shop is powered by DukaPress. It was built in ten minutes! It is a fully featured shop and can accept payments via: AlertPay, Paypal, MPESA, yuCash, and ZAP among others. If you want to build the same exact shop in even less time, you can do so!
All you need to do is:
- Download DukaPress
- Find a suitable web host. Or sign up with Pamoja Shops
- Install DukaPress
- Load the sample data
- Configure your shop, upload your own products, and start selling!
How easy is that? Should take you a few minutes in total if everything is ready! If you’re stuck, we’re here to help.
DukaPress is and always will be free to use, and it is from Kenya.
Interesting post but i find some untruths. Having played with DukaPress it seems to me to be a re-invention of the wheel. And Magento is not a nightmare to use as suggested here, the only nightmare could be osCommerce or probabaly Drupal/Ubercart. Probably for a user who simply wants an online Duka DukaPress is rght but we know that they is much more invovled. A classic example of getting traffic to a blog/ a collection of related blogs….Kenyan way of course.
Untruths? A re-invention of the wheel? How so? You must not have tried to do e-commerce on WordPress….because then you would know that it is currently a pain. Maybe this is why DukaPress is getting a modestly less-than-bad reception as seen here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dukapress/stats/ and here: http://dukapress.org/blog/2010/07/22/dukapress-enters-the-wild/
I would argue that running a Magento shop is probably out of reach for the less tech savvy amongst us, don’t you agree? DukaPress is built for those people. DukaPress is built for “a user who simply wants an online Duka”!
We are not part of any collection of ‘blogs’. We are a blog trying to market a piece of software that we built and believe in; a piece of software that we believe solves problems that people have. If you visit http://www.dukapress.org you may notice that it is not a ‘blog’.
Thank you for your comment.