This weekend I attended the first ever WordCamp Kenya at Crayfish Camp in Naivasha. The event which is focused on all things WordPress was well attended with over 100 participants, mostly from Nairobi. I had an opportunity to interview Kelvin Jayanoris who is one of the founders behind DukaPress.

DukaPress is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that has been developed from scratch in Kenya. DukaPress was launched in August 2010 and since then has been downloaded more than 20,000 times from WordPress. It is NOT the most popular e-commerce plugin (yet) for WordPress but it is doing really well by being adopted by businesses globally, even though it was initially developed for businesses in Kenya to deploy e-commerce on their web sites.

DukaPress was built from the ground up by Kelvin and his team to offer Kenyan businesses a localized and no frills WordPress e-commerce plugin that could be used for all sorts of payment platforms including Safaricom’s M-Pesa as well as other International platforms such PayPal. In the interview, Kelvin told me that they make money from DukaPress when their mostly International customers engage them to do simple or extensive customizations to meet their unique e-commerce needs. You can find out more about Kelvin and DukaPress in the interview below. Enjoy!