Tag: Coop e-Commerce

A new relationship? It’s like walking in the woods after dark.

There’s a lot of bumping into strange new things. There’s no knowing what kind of surprises lurk in the shadows of their partner’s personality.

Maina, fondly known as Maish – lives in a bedsitter in a residential block along Forest Road. It’s a bit cramped and pricey, but worth it. Shiny tiles, functional hot shower head, and close to his work place. He walks. Life has been pretty cool, till Brenda waltzed into his life.

Maish is now in a quagmire.

He met Brenda met on Facebook. The usual way. She liked posting memes. Maish first responded with emojis. Laughing emojis.

In between, she’d drop a selfie – and she was striking – filters notwithstanding. She had dimples, man. Dude graduates, emoji-wise. The love emoji. Red is a warm color.

Then he slid into her DM. He gets her Whatsapp number. They start chatting. Meaningless, at first.

How chilly is Nyandarua? Maish would want to know if it snowed there in July 1998.

Do you love chips? They are called fries, she’d remind him.

Can you operate a wheelbarrow? She confided that her dad owns 8 wheelbarrows.

Maish didn’t think it an engineering marvel that needed any sort of certification. Plus, he deemed himself an hustler.

He shares his grand life plan: save half of his salary to set up a business. He planned to buy a fleet of trollies to sell sausages and eggs on road intersections.

Brenda challenges him: Defend your thesis.

Easy. He’d rattled off a list – no overheads like rent, and council licensing. Profits are double-double. It seemed waterproof. He’d asked what she was doing.

Brenda says she’s a fresh graduate. Has a teaching degree from Maseno. But she intimates that she doesn’t look forward to a stint as a TSC employee.

She nails it further with a solemn declaration: Not even if ‘they tripled salaries’ at TSC.

Well, Maish had a rather noble regard for high school teachers. Brenda had started an online fashion business in campus. It had turned out rather well. She’d rattle off figures she’d achieved as profits. In campus.

If it wasn’t for her mother’s fragile heart, she’d have dropped out.

Maish was falling in love. Here’s an hustler. In the flesh – not just some hyped political rhetoric. He asked for a date, on her next resupply run to the city. She didn’t promise ‘anything’.

One Friday, Maish is at work. He receives a call from Brenda. She’s in town, she’d come in for some new stock. Maish says he cannot get off work in time – no worry, she’d be happy to come over see him at his place.

Send me a location pin on Whatsapp, she says.

What? For real? Dude’s heart is racing. A lot can go wrong for a first meeting. He starts ticking off the list in his head.

Did I flush the toilet this morning?

Did I get my dirty boxers off the coffee table? No, he’s still in them.

He feigns headache and gets off work half an hour earlier. He sprints home. Other than a flooded room, all is well. He’d forgotten to close the taps that morning. But he didn’t have a carpet, nothing to worry about.

Brenda arrives in a cab. That’s impressive,

Maish thinks. Not so much, though, when he started hauling up bales and cartons to the 8th floor. Brenda had a ton of luggage. It’s my new stock, babe. He blushes, she giggles – oops, I just called you babe. He gets a spring in his step.

Back in the bedsitter, there’s barely enough space left to breath. Or, fart. He’d had matoke and guacamole for lunch. Maish squeezes next to her on his two-seater. To break the ice, he asked her why they call an avocado, ‘guacamole’.

She didn’t hear him.

Brenda was busy. She had a phone on each hand. She was checking her social media accounts.

“Babe, am getting hits. How far is USIU from here” She asks.

If his life depended on it, Maish would have died on that day. He didn’t have a clue where USIU was – or what USIU stood for. Before he could figure it out, she was calling someone.

It was a boda boda guy. Yaani, barely ten minutes in his bedsitter, she had a boda boda guy.

“Babe, fungua hio box pale….no, no, si hio…this one. I marked it. Check for a pink kimono dress”.

Brenda is pointing with her phone to a box on the bed. It’s in the bottom row.

“Msee wa boda is coming to pick it. He’s delivering to USIU in the next few.” She says.

She speaks in a fast staccato – hardly the ‘memes girl’ Maish had imagined. He hefts and heaves on the boxes. A pink something, and something chiffon.

Brenda hands him the package.

“Babe! Hurry up! Go downstairs and give it to the boda guy at the gate. Thanks, babe”.

Maish runs down the stairs, gripping the rails.

The last time he did this, the KPLC guy was threatening to disconnect his power meter. The previous occupant of his bedsitter had ‘doctored’ the meter’.

He finds the delivery guy, hands over the package. He just rides off.

As Maish labors up the stairs, he’s in a dilemma. He realises living on 8th floor is not wise. Then, have we just been robbed?

He gets in. Mumbles something about the bike guy not giving him any money.

“Baaaaabe, don’t worry. That’s just a delivery guy. My clients pay online. Tushalipwa!” She says, hugging him. As he holds her, he smells her weave. It’s an expennsive synthetic. He could feel two phones in her hands digging into his back.

Instead of some TLC, Maish is treated to a business crash course on Co-op Bank e-commerce solutions. Brenda says she doesn’t have a business website – but, still……..

Co-op Bank e-Commerce solution works without a website. The merchant receives a unique link (Pay-By-Link) which they use to invoice their customers.

It works in a simple process:

• Once the merchant and the customer agree on the pricing, the merchant sends the payment link to the customers email address.
• The customer will receive an invoice with the link on their email.
• The link will open up a portal where the customer will insert their card details and the amount they are to pay.
• Once the payment goes through, the merchant will receive a payment confirmation via email and SMS.
• The customer will also receive a notification via SMS in the event they have subscribed to SMS alert with their card provider.

To be an entrepreneur means being comfortable with taking educated risks, in business.

The secret to success is buried in a formula that combines drive, forward momentum and persistence.

Here’s a few personal traits:

Passion

This is what drives you. You need a true sense of passion, and belief that the product on offer, or the service you have is what clients want. Passion is infectious – and will rub off on the staff and clients. A business launched without passion will lack the ooze and charisma – clients will not return.

Perseverance

A new venture may need up to a year before visible growth can be seen. Until then, an entrepreneur needs energy and enthusiasm to ride out the bumps. There will be constant errors – but a passionate owner will learn, and rise.

There will be daunting overhead bills, staff problems, cash flow issues. One just needs perseverance.

Empathy

This uncanny skill makes or breaks a new business.

The ability to understand your prospective client’s minds and visualize self from that angle. That’s how you realize their problems, and understand them. In that way, you can provide a solution – and this is what sells to your clients.

A practical solution to their problems.

Leadership Skills

A start up needs equally motivated staff to run. You need to be a leader – and not just loaded motivational pep-talks, but practical touches.

An entrepreneur has to learn the Art of Delegation.

This is to be cognizant that one cannot possess all the skills and knowledge needed to pursue the vision & mission of a company.

Like, one can have good social skills, but miserable in accounts.

Stamina

New ventures demand a complete lifestyle change.

Perhaps, one that requires working crazy, long hours. It may mean giving up some aspects of your life, and of those in your circles – vacations, weekends, private cars, etc.

Do you have the wherewithal to grind through long hours at work and lean budgets?

Before the big break, you need stamina to survive a period of intense sacrifice. It pays for one to have a supportive family that shares the vision.

Business skills

Basic understanding of how a business is structured and works is helpful. This is the foundation on which a business sits. Under this, it helps to be a creative problem solver.

To counter this, one has to hire skilled staff, or take the pains to learn the relevant skills, especially on delicate aspects of the business. Say, accounts, or marketing.

Another advisable trick is to align self with established business or financial entities to act as mentors. An entrepreneur learns from the mistakes of others.

In the finance section, for instance, a new start up needs articulate system off keeping books, calculate cash flow and monitor the inventory.

Introducing the Co-op Bank e-Commerce platform,

This robust e-Commerce platform offers a new business a variety of cashless ways to accept payments, or make purchases.

This includes use of mobile phones to access Co-op Bank accounts through USSD numbers, M-Coop Cash Apps, M-Pesa Pay bill numbers, or the use of Co-op Visa Cards, by swiping at payment points with PDQ/POS machines.

It’s easy to track expenses, credits or debits in real time. It’s fast, safe and convenient. Within moments, one receives account notification messages on mobile phones.

To learn more on cashless payments through the Co-op Bank e-Commerce platform, visit the nearest Co-op Bank branch.

Alternatively, check online by clicking here.

RELATED: https://www.ghafla.com/sponsored/what-are-the-benefits-of-exploiting-payment-options-offered-by-the-co-op-bank-e-commerce-platform/

It depends…

The first question is, will you be purchasing directly from a builder or buying the land yourself and building from scratch?

If you’re buying the land and building from scratch, the question becomes how cheaply you can purchase the land and how cost-efficiently you can build the house.

Are you planning to hire a builder? Or are you planning to manage the project yourself and hire your own sub-contractors? If you hire a custom builder, you’ll likely pay more than what it would cost if you managed the project yourself.

If you can manage the project yourself, hiring builders and casuals directly, it’d save you a lot in terms of costs you’d otherwise be paying subcontractors.

In all sense, it’s much cheaper to act as your own builder.

Buying an existing house means you’ve accepted all the choices somebody made for that house, whether you like them all or not.

In building, you have room to adjust initial plans on the go: Like, let’s add a room here while we are at it. Oh, why not have a hot tub? Granite looks better than marble….

Of course, with so much freedom comes the burden of choice.

You need to make thousands of decisions.

If you have lots of prior home-building experience, those decisions will come easy. If not, you’ll struggle with them for endless sleepless nights.

Thankfully, you’ll have plenty of time as you’ll be working your way through those decisions over many months, between 12-30 months would be a typical range to build a home.

Then, once you’ve made your decisions, you’ll start seeing the results.

You hope you’re right on ALL of them. Every mistake or poor decision costs you time, money, and energy. You will find yourself spending countless hours at the job site to try to minimize mistakes and correct poor decisions as quickly as possible.

At the end, you hope to get the home you started with. If you got lucky and got most of your decisions correct, you might finish on time and you’ll be able to save a good 10-20% compared to a finished home.

One of the tricks to make a success out of a building project is have a steadfast financial partner. A financial partner has to have a platform that makes easy cash-flow management and record keeping.

It’s a plus, if the financial partner allows multiple avenues to access and manage savings, make payments – and the versatility for round the clock banking.

 

Co-op Bank has greatly revamped their e-Commerce platform to assist businesses meet the increased demand from customers in going cashless.

Going cashless has a lot of benefits.

A client has a variety of payment options available. In making purchases for materials, paying staff and keeping records, the Co-op Bank e-Commerce platform allows flexibility, safety and convenience.

There’s several options:

• Online card payments
• PDQ/POS
• Lipa Na M-Pesa Till Number
• M-Pesa Paybill 400200
• M-Coop Cash

Visit the nearest Co-op Bank branch to learn more on e-Commerce, or check online by clicking here.