How To Start An Online Shop

December 2, 2009 by 15 Comments

One of the most common questions we get goes like, “Hey, how do i set up an online shop?” Because we’re all about seeing the Internet come through for people in Kenya, especially financially, I decided to write an article on how to start your own online shop, easy. Enjoy 🙂

Trust me, it is a very daunting task and it involves a hell of a lot. Are you up for all that? I do not know. I do know one thing though, the opportunity to make lots and lots of money is still very much there. In all markets most online stores are, for lack of better words, a complete waste of time.

No joke – there are so many badly designed and structured online shops out there that you’d be surprised. You could choose any market place and still have a very good shot at making a killing. If only you use correct procedure. And guess what? The wealth of tools available for your use is just unbelievable – challenging the Top Dogs in any market is something very do-able.

Where do you start?
As I said earlier, starting an online shop is no easy task. Should you start your own, you are bound to make lots and lots of mistakes. However, I beg you to always work with this in mind: “Customers first, money second“. Got it? Good, you’ll never go wrong. Many, many businesses mess up this simple task.

Before anything else, you need to ask yourself the same questions you’d ask yourself if you were going into business in the offline world. Do you have something to market? Will people buy what you want to sell? Will they pay enough money for you to make a profit?

Next you’ll need to choose a name for your site/shop. Since this will be your identity, it is VERY important. Take time to choose a good and easy-to-remember name. Read more about this, if need be.

Building your website
Unfortunately, if you want the best results there are only two courses of action:

  1. Hire professionals to build you a site. People like us. 🙂
  2. Do it yourself, but only if you have the technical know-how.

That said, here are some things you should keep in mind:

  • How many products do you have? If you have just a few, your site will look bare. (Depending on how it is built)
  • What type of products are you selling? This will affect how you display them – jewellery will be displayed differently from, say, aquariums. :p
  • You must have good quality pictures of your products.
  • Include item descriptions jameni! Of course your customers want to know this.
  • Ensure that your site loads quickly and that it is easy to navigate.
  • As well as making your site the best it can be for customers, make sure it is very easy for you to update it i.e. add new products or change prices.
  • Make the selling process as easy and as fast as possible. You don’t really need to make your customers register at your site, do you? This is an unnecessary step that will cost you sales!

Because I love my readers, I shall suggest a super easy way to build a top-of-the-range online shop. Listen carefully:

  1. Download wordpress
  2. Install wordpress on a server somewhere. How?
  3. Install this wordpress theme. How?
  4. Install this wordpress plugin. How?
  5. You have your very nice online shop!

Other tools you can use: Magento, osCommerce.

Web hosting
One your website is made, it needs to be hosted somewhere. This is so that it is accessible to the whole of the Internet. Learn more.

If you’re going to handle any kind of financial transactions through your website, you need to make sure your web host offers secure servers. This means that they offer SSL encryption. You should find out whether your prospective web host offers SSL encryption as part of its regular package or charges extra for this service.

When your website is your storefront, if your website is down, your store is closed – or worse, effectively nonexistent. So you need a web host that offers at least a 99% uptime guarantee. While asking about a web host’s uptime guarantee, you might also inquire as to its back up systems in case of emergencies.

There are hundreds of good web hosts out there. I recommend that you choose us. 🙂

Marketing your online shop
The key to online retailing is to strive to get as many people visiting your shop as possible. Please, please keep search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind. If need be, hire someone to do your SEO.

There are some helpful articles here and here. Oh and we are also available to help you with SEO.

Dealing with payments
You will need a way to accept payments online, or at the very least accept orders online. Many modern online shop creation systems (like the ones I suggested earlier) do this right out of the box. If you intend to sell to people in Kenya, it would be helpful to be able to receive payments by ZAP and MPESA. Here’s an article we wrote about this topic.

Conclusion
We haven’t covered everything you need to know in this article, but most of it is up there. You can have your shop ready by next week if you follow what the article says.

Good luck 🙂

PS I was thinking of doing a follow-up article on this topic by going step by step through what I did when setting up an existing online shop. Anyone interested?

Image courtesy of Jesse757.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , , ,

Form A Kenyan Company

December 1, 2009 by 6 Comments

Last week, I called out for help in making business registration easier in Kenya. I got a lot of responses (thanks!!!). Interestingly, a lot of these responses simply just pointed me to this website: formAKenyanCompany.

The site says this about itself:

formAKenyanCompany.com is an online specialist in limited company formation covering everything necessary to facilitate the formation and/or registration of a company in Kenya . All types of Kenyan company formation can be catered for and everything necessary to set up a limited company in the Kenya, including filing and all required documents, including the memorandum and articles of association are provided. Our automated on-line formation is quick, simple and affordable enabling the immediate check of company names with the Company Registry. All formations are done electronically with our incorporation system and delivered manually to the respective government offices. All costs include all necessary documents and filing fees at Sheria House and the company formation process is usually complete within 7 days.

Nice, isn’t it? Do check it out!

Filed Under: Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With:

Let’s make it easier to register businesses in Kenya

November 25, 2009 by 5 Comments

Hi wonderful readers

A few days ago, I was helping my niece to register a new business. She wanted to register a (limited liability) company. We found someone to do it for us – the person, a lawyer, charged us Kshs 20,000/-

Now, I was just thinking. If any man/woman in the street wants to start a business and needs a company, they would need to also pay this 20,000, wouldn’t they? For many start up businesses that I have known, this amount is simply too much. The money can be better used elsewhere.

In the spirit of helping all of us become better, financially and otherwise, I was thinking if at all we can do anything to make it easier to register companies in Kenya.

The biggest hurdle is drawing up the Articles & Memorandum of Association, isn’t it? While at school, we were taught that there are draft copies of these documents at the registrar. Is that so? Are they usable?

My idea is this: can we make draft copies of these documents that can serve “any business under the sun” and make them available for free download to anyone? In my humble opinion, it would be of massive help to aspiring entrepreneurs out there.

While at it, perhaps we can also do the same for partnerships, sole proprietorships and other forms of businesses. Ama?

What do you think? I’m no lawyer so, who wants to help?

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

An Online Strategy For Companies in Kenya

November 24, 2009 by 10 Comments

This one is from a while back. Someone asked me:

My question to you is, what do you think should be the online strategy for a tour company in Kenya and how should they approach it and what tools should they apply?

Here’s my response:

What would be a good online strategy for a tour company in Kenya? This is an interesting challenge. So let’s see, what I would do is launch an elegant website that is intuitive to use and stylish (web2.0-ish also). I’m assuming this site will have some sort of ‘place’ (a shopping cart, online booking form etc) where a sale needs to be made – focus on this. Make the buying/ordering process easy to use for even a passing browser. And the sales copy around it has to be absolutely well done. If need be, hire professional copywriters for this one page (menwithpens or Kenyan Freelancer come to mind). You do this to make sure that your site doesn’t suck at selling.

Now, in my mind, the target visitors of this site are not in Kenya. True? So you need to find how to reach them. I would include a blog with the website. You can talk honestly and with a personal voice (no corporate-speak) about Kenya, and why it’s such a great country. I’m sure there are tons of things that your blog can talk about.

How to get visitors? I like the organic way – make a remarkable site and blog and then apply SEO VERY well (the works: link building, directory submissions etc). Also, since your visitors are not from Kenya, it should be easy to find out where they hang out – other travel blogs, forums, etc. Go there and join those conversations and, by all means, get noticed. But be subtle.

To complement this sort of ‘organic’ strategy, also carry out a PPC advertising campaign (with Adsense or YPN). This will get some visitors and some sales (if you did your sales copy well). I don’t like extended PPC campaigns so probably you should phase this out as the organic traffic rises – unless your returns on the advertising are very good.

As you get visitors to the site, have some way to opt in visitors into an email marketing campaign. Use mailchimp (by my experience they rock!) to provide your auto responder software/services. Don’t spend too much money on this – people sometimes go crazy – just a basic Mailchimp account will do (they even have a free offering). Be creative in how you get people to join your email list (NEVER buy email addresses). Perhaps you could offer free Swahili lessons via email, or an amazing free video of unseen Kenyan delights. But I’m sure there’s no shortage of creativity on your end.

I think if you do this, you’ll have a good strong start. I doubt many other Kenyan sites have done this well. 😉

To recap:

  • Build an elegant site. Let is be super easy to use.
  • Do your sales copy excellently.
  • SEO everything.
  • Market the site by authentically joining the conversation on other travel blogs, forums and other sites.
  • Carry out a PPC campaign and consider stopping it (or slowing down) when there is enough organic traffic.
  • Create an email marketing campaign.

—-
I had not mentioned a social network strategy (Facebook, twitter, etc). I’ll work on that and post it here soon. Stay tuned. Got questions? I have answers! 🙂

Filed Under: Lazyweb, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: ,

Another Option To Raise Funds

November 24, 2009 by 2 Comments

When starting a business, sometimes one does not have enough money from his own personal sources to fund the business startup costs (‘capital’). There are two main sources of additional funding:

  1. Debt – basically you take a loan from a bank, or a friend, and agree how to pay it back.
  2. Equity – basically, you find someone to ‘invest’ in your business. They then get to own a certain agreed part of your business.

Usually, debt financing is much, much cheaper than equity financing. However, they are both sometimes unattainable for very young businesses. What to do?

Well, there’s a third source of funding. It’s not much different from debt financing but it is different enough. Basically, get someone who has some spare money and who is not a seasoned/experienced investor. Perhaps someone who retired recently and is looking for something to invest in (like a retired dentist).

You then offer them a deal: give me some money to launch my business and I’ll give you a certain percentage of my sales. Think about it – no endless meetings, punitive interest rates, complex accounting. You just pay a commission on your sales. It could work, ama?

Adapted from Seth Godin’s article.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

How To Fax For Free

November 21, 2009 by 6 Comments

So recently we’ve been having a number of dealings with organisations and people in the big USA here at Like Chapaa. We’ve had to send a number of faxes, unfortunately. Unfortunately because we consider faxing to be…old school. We don’t even have fax machines at our offices, for starters!

What to do? Well, for a while we sent the faxes the old way…but we’re internet people so we were always looking for a smart alternative. We think we found one!

How to send faxes to the USA, free of charge and via the internet
Cool, eh? It’s simple too. Just:

  1. Get a free account and US fax number from k7. K7 will give you a US number that will let anyone fax or call you. Faxes and voicemail will be delivered to your (email) inbox.
  2. Go over here [www.faxzero.com] here [www.gotfreefax.com] and send your free fax. Be sure to put in your new US fax number in the “sender information fax #” field.
  3. That’s it, you’re done!

We’ve been sending faxes (and receiving them) with smiley faces ever since we discovered this. Hopeful, some our dear readers (that’s you) will find this useful.

What can you do with this? Well, if you’re doing business with anyone in the USA, you can now get faxes and voicemail delivered to a US number and you retrieve them quickly and easily from your email.

Have you tried it yet? How did it go? What do you think?

Image courtesy of Yo Spiff.

Filed Under: Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Family Bank Goodies

November 20, 2009 by Leave a Comment

In partnership with KDN, Family Bank is set to offer free Wifi within a radius of one kilometer of each of the bank’s branches. The bank has quite a number of branches. 😀

So now you can add Family Bank to your list of where you can get Wifi in Nairobi. :p Apart from increasing it’s brand awareness, how else will Family Bank benefit from this? I’m not sure…However, you and I shall benefit immensely!

More to that, the bank shall also be offering financing to those who are interested in setting up internet and data related businesses. Are you an entrepreneur? Looking for financing?

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Small Business Tagged With: , ,