How to sell online in Kenya

The payment part is already sorted. That's the unusual thing about selling in Kenya and it's worth saying out loud before anything else.

Everyone you want to sell to has M-Pesa. They use it for matatu fare, for rent, for a KSh 20 mandazi. You don't have to teach anyone how to pay, you don't need a gateway, and you don't need a website to receive money. What you need is a page that shows what you sell and what it costs, a number people can pay, and a way to get a KSh 2,800 pair of sandals to someone in Nakuru without either of you losing the plot.

So this article is mostly about the second and third things, plus one payment decision that nobody explains properly and that costs sellers about an hour a week.

Where your buyers already are

WhatsApp status does more selling work in Kenya than most sellers give it credit for. It reaches exactly the people who already have your number, which is the warmest audience you own, and it disappears in a day so you can post the same six sandals every week without anyone minding.

Instagram is where new buyers find you. Facebook groups and the classifieds sites are where people who are actively shopping look, and the difference matters: someone on Instagram is being interrupted, someone on Jiji is already deciding.

Post the same product to all of them and you've done the cheap version of a marketing strategy. What breaks is the next step. Every one of those channels ends in a DM, and a DM is where prices, sizes and delivery costs get retyped forever. Send everyone to one page instead, and let the page answer the four questions you're tired of answering.

Send money, till, or paybill

Three different things, and the difference matters more than the fee difference.

Send Money to your personal number. Works immediately, zero setup, and it is what you'll use for your first ten orders. It also means your customers are paying a person, your business income lands in the same wallet as your rent, and every payment arrives labelled with a name and nothing else.

Buy Goods, or Lipa na M-Pesa till. The buyer enters a till number and an amount. Fast, familiar, one fewer field to get wrong. Safaricom asks for business registration documents before it issues one, so check what they currently require before you plan around it.

Paybill. The buyer enters a paybill number, then an account number, then an amount.

That extra field is the whole point and almost nobody frames it this way. A Buy Goods till has no reference field. A Paybill does. When you take fourteen payments in a day, a till gives you fourteen credits labelled with fourteen names, and you spend your evening working out which KSh 2,800 belongs to which order. A paybill gives you fourteen credits each carrying whatever the buyer typed, and if you've told them to type their order number, you're done in four minutes.

The account number field on a paybill is not admin. It is the difference between reconciling in four minutes and reconciling in forty.

The trade is that a paybill asks the buyer for one more piece of information, and some of them will type nonsense in it anyway. If you take a handful of orders a day, a till is fine. Past roughly ten a day, the missing field starts to cost you real time. Who pays the transaction charge also differs between these options and the tariffs get revised, so check Safaricom's current tariff rather than trusting a number in an article.

The trust thing a bank account can't match

Safaricom's Hakikisha feature shows a customer the recipient's name before the transaction completes, across Send Money, agent transactions, paybill and Lipa na M-Pesa merchant payments. It's on by default.

For a seller, that's free credibility and it's specific to this market. A Kenyan buyer about to pay you sees a name pop up, and if that name is the business they think they're buying from, a small doubt closes. If the name is a person they've never heard of, the doubt opens.

Two practical consequences.

If you have a till or paybill, write the registered name on your page. "You'll see BRIGHTSTEP LTD when you confirm, that's us." A buyer who sees an unexpected name mid-payment cancels, and you never hear from them again, and you never find out why.

If you're still on Send Money from a personal number, expect to explain that name in the DMs, every time, forever. That friction is a real cost and it's one of the better reasons to formalise.

The same principle runs the other way. A buyer who paid can tell you the exact time and amount, and you can find it. So ask for time and amount, not for a screenshot, because a screenshot is a picture and pictures can say anything. Check your own SMS or app, not the one they sent you.

Delivery, and the three systems that actually run

Boda, inside a town. Fast, cheap, and dependent on one rider's phone. The failure mode is money rather than logistics: if the rider collects on your behalf you now owe yourself a reconciliation. Settle at handover, both of you looking at the same number, written down. Not from memory that evening. Rider handovers and cash reconciliation has the whole procedure.

Neighbourhood pickup points. The parcel goes to an agent shop in the buyer's estate and they collect it there, often paying at collection. It's cheaper than door delivery, it removes the "rider couldn't find me" failure entirely, and Kenyan buyers are comfortable with it. If you're shipping under KSh 3,000 items, this is usually the right default.

Bus parcel services, for the counties. Nairobi to Kisumu, Mombasa, Eldoret. The parcel goes on a bus, the buyer collects at the office, and it's cheap and reliable if the buyer is near a stage. It needs a phone number that works and a buyer who understands they're collecting, not receiving.

Whichever you use, quote the delivery cost before you confirm the order. A buyer who agrees to KSh 2,800 and then hears "plus KSh 350" feels tricked, even though nothing dishonest happened.

Worked example: Wanjiru, beaded leather sandals, Nairobi

Wanjiru sells beaded leather sandals made by a workshop in Kariokor. KSh 2,800 a pair, six designs, sizes 36 to 42. She sells through Instagram and WhatsApp status, about 50 pairs a month, roughly 60% Nairobi and the rest to Nakuru, Kisumu and Mombasa.

Her setup:

• Bio link to a page with all six designs, sizes, KSh 2,800, and a delivery table.
• Paybill, with the instruction "account number = your order number" written directly under it, plus the registered business name so nobody panics at the Hakikisha prompt.
• Nairobi: pickup point, KSh 150, or boda door delivery at KSh 300.
• Counties: bus parcel, KSh 250 to KSh 400, quoted before confirming, paid upfront.
• Nothing ships until she's seen the credit in her own app.

A month is about KSh 140,000 of goods. Her cost of taking payment is Safaricom's tariff and nothing else. No gateway, no processor, no monthly subscription.

The mistake that taught her the paybill lesson: she ran a Buy Goods till for her first five months, and in December she took 90 orders and lost track of two of them completely. One buyer had paid and never received sandals, found her three weeks later, and was extremely polite about it, which somehow made it worse. She switched to a paybill in January. The reconciliation time she used to spend on Sunday nights is now about five minutes on a Tuesday.

Getting paid at the door

Cash on delivery exists here, but the Kenyan version is often not cash. The rider arrives, the buyer M-Pesas the till on the spot, the rider confirms and hands over. That's cleaner than physical cash because there's a record, no change to carry, and no rider walking around with KSh 30,000.

It still carries the same economics as any pay-on-delivery arrangement: you've paid to send something before you've been paid for it, and if the buyer doesn't show, you've paid twice. So the rule most sellers land on is: pickup-point collection with payment at collection for anything local, prepaid for anything going on a bus. Sending an unpaid parcel to another county is how you find out what your margin really is.

Registration and KRA

Two separate obligations that people run together.

Registering a business name or company gets you a name nobody else can use, a business account, and the documents Safaricom will want if you're applying for a till or paybill. Tax is a different thing and applies to your income whether or not you've registered a business.

I'm not printing thresholds, turnover limits or fee figures here, because those change and a stale number could cost you money. Check the Business Registration Service through eCitizen for registration and kra.go.ke for what you currently owe and what you currently have to file. If you're near any line you think exists, pay an accountant for an hour before you assume you're under it.

What you should do from order one, regardless: keep every order in one list with a date, an amount, a buyer and a delivery method, and stop mixing stock money with shopping money. Separating business and personal money is the short version, and it's easier to start at 50 orders a month than at 500.

Where Sailo fits, and what it can't do for you

Sailo gives you the page. A link like sailo.store/yourname, live the moment you sign up, with your designs, sizes, prices and delivery options on it, and an order button that opens WhatsApp with the item, the options, the address and the total already written out. That kills the ten-message conversation that currently precedes every order. Bank transfer and cash on delivery are rails, and Sailo takes nothing on either, because on those it never touches the money.

Now the honest part, and in Kenya it's a big one.

Sailo has no M-Pesa rail. The complete list is card, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, email, phone, bank transfer and cash on delivery. That's it. What you can do is put your paybill number, your account-number instruction and your registered business name into the bank transfer instructions field, and confirm every payment yourself against your own M-Pesa messages. That works and it's what Kenyan sellers on Sailo actually do. But name it accurately: Sailo is holding your catalogue and your order record, and Safaricom is holding your money. Sailo cannot tell you a payment arrived, and there is no integration coming that would let it.

Card payments aren't available to you. Sailo's card rail runs on Stripe and only Stripe, and Stripe's own global availability page in August 2026 listed Kenya under "extended network" pointing at Paystack rather than as a launched Stripe country. Sailo doesn't support Paystack. So the $49 Business plan won't give you a card button here, and anything you've read saying otherwise is out of date. It matters less than it sounds, because your buyers weren't asking for cards.

The free plan caps at 10 products. Six sandal designs is comfortable. Six designs across seven sizes, if you list each as a separate product rather than an option, is not, so use options.

What to do next

Do two things this week.

Count how many payments you took last month and divide by the number of days you sold. If it's more than about ten a day and you're on a Buy Goods till, start the paybill application, because the account number field will give you back an hour a week and you're currently paying for it in Sunday evenings.

Then write your delivery table as actual numbers, one line per destination type, and put it on the same page as your prices. Not in a highlight, not in a pinned comment. On the page a buyer lands on when they tap your link.

If you want the full comparison of what every payment rail costs and what it leaves you to do afterwards, how to take payment as a small seller covers it. And if buyers keep asking whether you're real before they'll pay, proving you are a real seller is the checklist to work through first.