Basically, Funua is a website which is where you want to go if you want to know about sweet discounts and sales offers in Nairobi. You want to go out shopping? Why don’t you open up Funua.com and see if you can save some money? Uchumi ni mbaya and if you can save something then you should. Funua is your friend.

Learn more about how we started it: New Pet Project: Sales & Discounts in Nairobi
Visit Funua: Funua – Sales & Discounts in Nairobi

They call the Third World the lazy man’s purview; the sluggishly slothful and languorous prefecture. In this realm people are sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and therefore indigent—totally penniless, needy, destitute, poverty-stricken, disfavored, and impoverished. In this demesne, as they call it, there are hardly any discoveries, inventions, and innovations. Africa is the trailblazer. Some still call it “the dark continent” for the light that flickers under the tunnel is not that of hope, but an approaching train. And because countless keep waiting in the way of the train, millions die and many more remain decapitated by the day.

“It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man next to me said. “Get up and do something about it.”

More: You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum!Similar Posts:

• Voices of Africa
• Shameless Plagiarism at The Nation Media Group
• Internet TV with Joost
• The American Government is Trying to Ruin the Internet … and Can Affect us in KENYA!!
• The Khan Academy

e-Pay Kenya opened its doors in January 2009 as e-pesa then rebranded in 2010 to ePAY-KENYA. Esther Kimani of e-Pay Kenya reached out to us to provide more information on what e-Pay does. This article is based on her information to us, and on good reports their customers.

e-Pay Kenya offers two ways to withdraw your hard-earned money:

1. Moneybookers
“We have an Merchant Agreement with Moneybookers allowing us to officially run a Money transfer website using their services. This explains why the moneybookers fee is lower (11%) than Paypal. We therefore do not operate under any fear of account limitation as we operate with blessings from Moneybookers. We deliver within the hour but often less,” says Esther Kimani of e-Pay Kenya.

2. Paypal
Esther continues, “We use a third-party gateway to avoid the direct interface with Paypal because we have experienced the danger of doing so (when we operated as e-pesa). This explains why the transaction charges are higher (14%) than Moneybookers but then our users enjoy the following benefits:

1. Peace of mind when dealing with us as there is no possibility of our users’ accounts being limited by PayPal
2. Our third-party gateway does fraud tests on our behalf to minimize fraudulent transactions.
3. We have a strict KYC (Know Your Customer) policy. All our users have to send Identification Documents in order to have their accounts verified, thus allowing them to make transactions.
4. We demand that users forward their Paypal Transaction Confirmation emails before they can cash their money. We use this document to authenticate the bona fide account holders. We have caught up with fraudsters who hack into unsuspecting paypal account holders’ accounts.
5. Delivery within 24 hours but often less.”

Charges
The bulk of the fees are charged when you deposit money from Moneybookers/PayPal into e-Pay Kenya. Their charges at this time are as follows:

Moneybookers:

• Deposit 11%
• Withdrawal USD 3 irrespective of the amount

Paypal:

• Deposit 14%
• Withdraw USD 3 irrespective of the amount

Conclusion
It seems to me that e-Pay Kenya has a very well thought-out service. It is the best of all such businesses that I have come across so far. It is a bit pricey, but as we wait for PayPal to open itself up, e-Pay Kenya remains a good and reliable alternative.

What do you think of e-Pay Kenya?

ALERT
As far as I know, the REAL e-Pay Kenya is at: www.epay-kenya.com

NOT: www.epaykenya.com

Similar Posts:

• PayMPESA Helps Withdraw Your PayPal Funds to MPESA
• PayPal Stops Working For Equity Account Holders
• How to Withdraw Money From PayPal in Kenya
• How To Receive Payments Online
• TrINC Money : MPESA-PayPal Service [Updated]

Lately, there’s been a growing trend to build nice little WordPress-powered Amazon shops and then sell them on Flippa for $200 or so. S that is the second way you can earn from WordPress Amazon shops.

There are probably thousands of people who make money this way … why shouldn’t you? Try it.

Today, we’re presenting you with a very simple and intuitive way to build an amazon shops using WordPress and DukaPress: Using DukaPress & WordPress To Create An Amazon Shop.

Go forth and profit!

As much as I loathe Safaricom sometimes, I cannot live without my MPESA. Problem is, MPESA text messages are deleted (by me) as soon as I get them …. which unfortunately means I often cannot keep a record of who paid me or what payments I made. Don’t even mention that I then have to spend Kshs 1/- to find out my MPESA balance. This is where pesaDroid comes in, it helps you to monitor your MPESA transactions. specifically, it offers the following features:

1. Ability to scan your SMS inbox and retrieve MPESA transactions
2. Ability to store the transaction data in an internal database so that evidence of a transaction persists even after the SMS is deleted.
3. Ability to generate regular statements from these transactions
4. Ability to send the statements to your email address.
5. Ability to send us feedback for improvement of the service.

This nifty little app is available for sale on the Android market at Kshs 256.84

More information: pesaDroid

What do you think of pesaDroid?

Similar Posts:

• How To Fax For Free
• TrINC Money : MPESA-PayPal Service [Updated]
• Improve Business Using Your Website
• The Most Popular Browser & Operating System in Kenya
• The “Kenyan App” Market?

It gets even easier with WordPress. WordPress is the simplest and easiest to content management system around and so it makes a lot of sense for Amazon affiliates to want to use WordPress to run their Amazon affiliate shops. I’m sure there are plenty of ways to do this but one of the best, we believe, comes from DukaPress 2.3.5.

In version 2.3.5, we added a new feature that lets you create products which will redirect to an external URL when you click on their “Add to Cart”/”Buy Now” button. (This was a very sought-after feature!).

This means that you can create products as normal but have them redirect to Amazon (or any other site) where you can earn affiliate commissions.

The best thing about doing this with DukaPress is that you can use the “grid view” to easily and quickly create a professional-looking shop and start earning right away.

How do you do this?

1. First, you need to download and install DukaPress
2. Then, you need to find a nice looking theme for your site. You can check out some of the beautiful DukaPress themes.
3. Then proceed to set up your DukaPress shop as usual.
4. When creating your products, do everything as normal but place the affiliate link for that product in the box that asks for “Affiliate URL” as shown below.


Add New Product (click for larger image)

5. Set up as many products as you want and then use the grid display shortcode to create a page that displays all your products in a nice grid.
6. You’re done! You should have a page like this one. Notice how the “Buy Now” buttons redirect to external URLs.

You can learn more about this feature here.

To enhance and style up your new Amazon shop, have a look at our List View and Styles addons.

Good luck!

So this year I have come across many people who want websites and are willing to pay good money to get one. trouble is, most seem to have LITTLE idea of how to use a website for their business. For the web designers in the room, I am sure you have met that guy who wants a quick website up in a week. They send you their company profile and bam! one week later you have them up and running. They then ask you to create a few email accounts based on their domain name and every thing goes well. Or so it seems. One year later, when it is time to renew the domain name, the guy is:
A. shutting down the website (what does this even mean?); or
B. renewing the domain name (for the email addresses) but does not care much about the website (and will try to get away with not paying for the web hosting); or
C. ignoring your emails and calls

So what happened?
Simple. Most people and businesses in Kenya get a website because it is the “in” thing. It is just what people do – you “have to get” a website dammit! But once they actually have their website, they have no idea what to do with it. It will forever remain an expensive “brochure” lost in a sea of millions of other websites and the hefty amount paid to the web designer will be a painful reminder.

You think I am over-generalizing things? Want a quick test to prove my theory? Good, because I have one. Ask three random people who recently had websites made for their business if they ever earned a single shilling from their website. How many of these websites even get more than 20 “hits” a day consistently?

Sadly, in Kenya, we build websites and then we forget about them and get busy “running the business”. The website was just something we knew we had to do.

Think about your business. Do you have a website? What, exactly, does your business gain from it? Is having your website address on your business card enough return on investment for you? If yes, then good, I am happy for you.

If the answer is no. Well, then, you’re in trouble. A website, in my humble opinion, is meant to sell your products and/or your business. You should have a reliable way to measure how much of your revenues were directly or indirectly attributable to your website.

Otherwise, you should not have paid so much for that flashy beautiful site. Maybe next time you should get a picture of your business card as your homepage and leave it at that!

Similar Posts:

• Get A Free Domain Name With CO.cc
• The Problem With Web Design
• Domain Name Registration
• How Does A Website Work?
• Freelancers & SEO – What You Should Know

• We’ve added a REAL “Out of Stock” button so you do not have to do anything fancy to indicate that some of your products are “out of stock”.
• We’ve removed the price from being shown in the variations drop down menu. We felt that it was confusing.
• Now, when you add an item to the cart, the particular product variation (if any) that you chose is shown in the shopping cart widget.
• On the “Thank You” page, your customers will now be able to see a summary of what they have just purchased. We feel like this will add value to your shop, especially when you have the PDF invoice turned off.
• The order log page has been improved a LOT. The page now shows all the details of a particular transaction, including buyer’s contact information as well as shipping information.
• Perhaps the most interesting, we have added an “affiliate mode”. Basically, you can now have products which redirect to an external URL when you click the “Add to Cart” button. This feature has been requested severally and we are glad to finally have it added in. Learn more by clicking here.
• We crushed many bugs.

A while back we introduced premium DukaPress addons. These premium addons are meant to enable us to support the DukaPress project and keep investing time and resources into making DukaPress the most simple and most powerful WordPress e-commerce platform. We ask you to support us in our endeavor to do this. Currently, the following are available:

• DukaPress Styles – it enables you to make your shop look good, without forcing you to buy or install another theme. i.e. enable elegant DukaPress styling on your current theme at the click of a button with no code knowledge required.
• Shipping Pro
• Simple Slideshow
• DukaPress List View

Please enjoy DukaPress 2.3.5, it should be available for immediate download.

In fact, “You’re a second-class citizen if you don’t know how to read and write today, and in twenty or thirty years the same will be true for people who don’t have basic computer programming skills. Those who don’t understand–at the very least–the concepts of order-of-execution, variables, data structures and recursion will be as socially and economically disadvantaged as the illiterate are now.

There was a time when literacy and basic arithmetic were skills reserved only to intellectuals and monks. Today our monks are programmers who know how to wield magic and illuminate scrolls of code. If you don’t understand what an array is today, or how to loop over it, then you’d better learn or you’ll be screwed tomorrow. The reasons unfold below.” – The Future of IT (click to read more)

Do you know the basics of programming? Are you ‘literate‘?

In case you want to learn the basics of computer programming, then you are in luck. Renown Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun is going to be running a free online course that promises to teach you the basics of computer programming in just seven weeks.

The course is:

CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE
Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!

You can sign up for free here: www.udacity.com

Similar Posts:

• Confessions, and the church of Google
• Keyword Research For A Simple Blog Business
• Strategic SEO
• Don’t Be Left Out – Learn How To Make Money Domaining
• An Experiment in Kenyan Movies Part 2 – SEO

Trinc Money seems to be a new service that allows you to transfer money to and from PayPal via MPESA. yes, this means that it lets you both withdraw and deposit money into PayPal using MPESA. Sounds good, eh?

Costs
Apart from the usual PayPal and MPESA fees, Trinc Money charges what seems to be a used to charge a standard flat Kshs 1000 transaction fee. Depending on how much you send, this can work out to be extremely cheap. But is it sustainable?

They have since updated their fees to 6.9% + KES.250

Sustainability
I worry about this service. Does it have the required blessing from PayPal? As far as I know, PayPal does not allow this kind of money transfer service. If your remember correctly, other services got around this issue by packaging themselves as selling “vouchers” which could be redeemed for money. This seems not to be the case with Trinc Money.

Additionally, PayPal is rumored to be very very close to launching fully in Kenya. Would this not outright kill TrincMoney?

I have reached out to Trinc Money for comment on both of the above.

I am sorry if I feel overly critical of TrINC Money, I am just being prudent. I am aware that PayPal frowns upon this kind of “money transfer” business working through PayPal and I would not want the readers of Like Chapaa to suffer any loss as a result of reading this article.

So, dear readers, what do you think of this? Has anyone tried to use Trinc Money?

Response from TrINC Money:

Trincmoney is neither a money transfer service nor a currency exchange service. What we do provide is a platform for registered PayPal users to send electronic PayPal value to the Trincmoney PayPal account. These funds are not withdrawn and are valid PayPal transactions initiated by registered PayPal users.

Upon a customer’s request, our service sends our customers electronic monetary value depicted in ones M-PESA Account representing an equal amount of Cash held by the MPESA Holding Company Limited and which may be redeemed through an M-PESA Agent for an equal amount of legal tender in the Republic of Kenya, to their MPESA registered mobile numbers. Note that MPESA electronic value is NOT legal tender.

With regard to money laundering, Trincmoney carries out the required due diligence on customers who send us money and who receive money from us.

If PayPal were to open up shop on Kenya it would be a blessing to a lot of people who use the Internet to send and receive money. Trincmoney will survive simply because a PayPal withdrawal takes 4 working days to effect while our service is effected within the hour. Also chances are that the charges will be higher.

I hope I have answered your queries. I have also read your blog on our service. Please note that we changed our rates and are now charging 6.9% + KES.250. Check out our Facebook Page and Twitter handle and sample some of our customer reviews.

Similar Posts:

• Another Way to Withdraw Money From PayPal in Kenya
• Opportunity: Online MPESA Agent?
• Receiving Online Payments In Kenya
• PayMPESA Helps Withdraw Your PayPal Funds to MPESA
• How to Withdraw Money From PayPal in Kenya