@Kioko, Abit windy but i do get the drift. Am i correct if I conclude that PesaPal is our local equivalent of the American Paypal? Oops another middle class question :-) walu. nb: I do hope you are not a mwalimu since you might "lose" many students. Though you would make a good preacher given as you speak in parables :-) @Wash - most welcome to ride on my ignorance :-) ________________________________ From: Dennis Kioko <dmbuvi@gmail.com> To: Walubengo J <jwalu@yahoo.com> Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 2:03 PM Subject: Re: [kictanet] Paypal Value Proposition? Let me try helping. Assuming that I somehow acquired a container of the rare Nexus 4 phones, for sale in Kenya. Now, I don't own a shop, and may not be interested in setting up one, or may have one, but would like to target the upward mobile, the likes of Munyao Longwe, who are Internet Savvy. I therefore create a site where Munyao can come and order himself a phone, for delivery to his home or office, perhaps through Aramex or another courier. Now, Munyao has to pay me before I deliver the phone. He can do so in a number of ways, perhaps by M-Pesa, Equity Bank card, Visa , Mastercard Debit or Credit. To collect the money from Munyao, I would need to give him my M-pesa number, and wait for him to pay, or present a card swiping machine from which he can swipe his preferred card. But this is quite cumbersome and introduces the need of reconciliation and possibility of errors - dispatch of an item I am unsure is paid for, or non-dispatch of a paid for item since I can't find the records. I therefore decide to come up with a system that will accept whatever payment system Munyao presents, be it Airtel Money, or his Cayman island issued Credit Card. The system will process his payment and show all payments in one dashboard. Now, I would need to hire someone to do such a system, or another to configure the Open Source PesaPi (Google). However, one enterprising Liko has developed PesaPal, which does payments from a large variety of sources, and presents the info from the same in a standard output. He then charges me a percentage of sales on every transaction, or perhaps a graduated fee like M-Pesa. With his system, my work is reduced to just looking at whether payments have been made against orders, and for how much. Furthermore, I can automate further by using PesaPal's Application Programming Interface to link my Point of Sale system with PesaPal. Yo therefore make an order - pay via Pesapal - my PoS acknowledges payment and credits your shopping basket with the item, and allows it to be checked out, or delivered. I can therefore go sit by my container all day, await notifications from PesaPal, and dispatch mobile phone through courier. I no longer have to call Longwe to ask how he will pay, or later reconcile my payments against my dispatched orders, since all this is done automatically. Hope this sort of explains it, or did I make things worse?