ICTworks by Inveneo

There's a new ecommerce site in Kenya, Rachel's Bargain Corner which claims to be the "complete online shopping experience in Kenya". With such a bold title, reminding me of Amazon.com's initial bravado, I've interviewed its founder Rachel Essendi, to find out more about its history and future:

Wizard of the Crow

How did the Rachel's Bargain Corner idea come about?

Rachel: Partly due to difficulty in getting employment and the thrill of trying out something new. I did a course in biomedical science and technology in university and completed the same in August 2007, I worked a bit in a laboratory before quitting but a job in the research agencies was not forthcoming and so i decided to start a business on my own, my husband who happens to be a partner in the business was for the idea also and he pledged to support me through out especially on the technical side of things.

What business capital (cash, connections, etc) did you need to get it started?

Rachel: In terms of cash we dint need much this was due to the fact that we are still based at home and all the technical work was done by my business partner Enock, while I worked to get and maintain the business connections and relations.

We started the business with the bare minimums including two laptops that Enock owned but decided to use in the business, one laptop started as the one hosting the payment engine and also served as our Internet proxy server and it was running on a Linux OS, and the other laptop we used to do our day to day work.

Was the Rachel's Bargain Corner site designed and coded in Kenya?

Rachel: The whole site and the associated support applications including the payment engine and the order management system were coded in Kenya by my business partner Enock. He has experience in system development having had short stints with two software development houses in the country. He hold a Bsc in Computer Science from Egerton University Kenya and he graduated in April 2007. He took some time off in April to work on the site and had it up and running beginning July this year. Enock is still doing the maintenance and further development of the site.

We choose to host our web site through a local hosting company that has very good terms and we started with a GPRS modem to provide for the internet connectivity.

After the Vote

How do you market an eCommerce site in a country that has low (5-10%?) Internet penetration?

Rachel: I've always believed that if you create a service that is useful to people, they will go all the way to try and access it. our target marketing avenues so far has been the print media and word of mouth - this is due to our limited budget when it comes to marketing and thus we are targeting any news outlets to create awareness about our presence and so far we have got the two leading media houses do our story.

Through the publishers that we started with we got some connections to media people and that enabled us to present our story to be put in one of the leading daily newspaper the Nation and has also enabled us to appear on a local Televison program called Zinduka aired on one of the leading broadcasters in the country Citizen TV.