Terms of Service

DukaBot lets you sell on WhatsApp. Your customers order in a WhatsApp chat and pay by M-Pesa or card. You run your shop from the DukaBot dashboard.

In these terms, “we”, “us” and “DukaBot” mean the operator of DukaBot at dukabot.app. “You” means the business that opens a DukaBot account, and the person who opens it for that business.

These terms cover your use of DukaBot as a merchant: the website, the dashboard, the WhatsApp bot, payments and cash-outs. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data and forms part of these terms.

• You must be at least 18 years old and allowed to make this agreement for your business.
• The details you give us must be true. Keep them up to date.
• Keep your login details safe. You are responsible for what is done with your account.

You accept these terms when you create your account.

We may change these terms or our prices. We tell you at least 30 days before a change takes effect, by e-mail or WhatsApp. A change that the law requires, or that only helps you, can take effect sooner.

Each version of these terms carries its date on this page. When a new version takes effect, the dashboard asks you to accept it before you carry on. If you do not accept it, you can stop using DukaBot and close your account as described under Account Termination. Fees you already owe stay owed.

Our plans and their prices are on our pricing page. The Scale plan is priced by agreement with each business. The prices that apply to you are the ones shown on your billing page in the dashboard at the time, or for Scale the price we agreed with you. All amounts are in Kenya shillings.

• Plan fee: paid plans have a monthly fee, paid in advance by M-Pesa from the dashboard. If you do not renew, you have 7 days to pay. After that your shop moves to the Free plan. You can cancel or move to a lower plan at any time; the change takes effect at the end of the month you have paid for. We do not refund part of a month.
• Fee per paid order: each plan includes a number of paid orders each calendar month (Nairobi time). On some plans that number is zero. For each paid order beyond it, we charge the fee per order of your plan. A paid order is one your customer has paid through DukaBot into your DukaBot wallet. An order that is never paid carries no fee. If you move to a higher plan during a month, its included orders count from the moment you move.
• Founding offers: if you joined with a founding offer, we will not raise its monthly price or reduce its included orders while you stay on that plan.

Where your money goes. When a customer pays, the money goes into a wallet for your business at IntaSend, our payments partner. The wallet is held under DukaBot's IntaSend account. The money in it is yours, less what you owe under these terms. You cash out to M-Pesa from the dashboard or on WhatsApp, or automatically if you turn on automatic cash-out.

• How we take our fees: we do not send you a bill for fees per order. When you cash out, we take the fees you owe from the amount and send you the rest.
• IntaSend's charges: IntaSend charges its own fees for collecting payments and for sending money to M-Pesa. Those charges come out of your wallet. They are IntaSend's fees, not ours.
• Timing: we send a cash-out as soon as we can, but M-Pesa and IntaSend decide when it arrives, so we do not promise a time. If a cash-out fails, we may try it again. If we cannot tell whether money left your wallet, we hold the cash-out until we have checked with IntaSend.
• Checking your fees: your dashboard lists the fee on each order, and you can download the list. If you think a fee is wrong, tell us within 60 days and we will look into it.

You are the seller. Each sale is between you and your customer. We provide the tools; we are not a party to the sale.

• You are responsible for your products: that they are legal to sell in Kenya, safe, correctly described and correctly priced, and that you hold any licence they need.
• You are responsible for delivery: that the customer gets what they ordered, on the terms you gave them, with your own riders or your own arrangements.
• You follow the law, including Kenyan consumer protection law, and WhatsApp's business and commerce policies.
• You send marketing messages only to customers who agreed to receive them, and you stop when a customer asks.

You must not use DukaBot to sell or offer:

• illegal drugs, or weapons, ammunition or explosives;
• stolen or counterfeit goods, or protected wildlife products;
• alcohol, tobacco or medicines, unless you are licensed to sell them and the law allows them to be sold this way;
• adult sexual content, gambling, loans or investment schemes;
• anything WhatsApp's commerce policy does not allow.

You must not use DukaBot for fraud, to take money for something you do not mean to supply, or to move money that is not payment for a real sale.

If a customer or an authority complains about your shop, you deal with the complaint. If someone makes a claim against us because of your products, your delivery or your breach of these terms, you cover our reasonable costs of that claim.

Refunds are between you and your customer. You set your refund policy, and it must follow the law.

• To refund a paid order, cancel it in the dashboard, or tell the bot on WhatsApp that you cannot fulfil it. This sends a refund request to DukaBot support. Support checks it and sends the refund to the customer through IntaSend, in full or in part.
• The refund is paid from your DukaBot wallet. Keep enough in it to cover refunds you promise.
• If an order is refunded in full, we reverse its fee per order. If it is refunded in part, the fee stays. A refund does not give back an included order.
• We may refund a customer from your wallet ourselves when a payment was taken twice or by mistake, or when the law, a court or IntaSend requires it. We tell you when we do.

Closing your account. An admin of your account can archive your shop in Settings. Cash out your balance first: a shop with money in its wallet cannot be archived. Archiving takes your shop offline and signs you out. We keep your data, so you can restore the shop later; to have it deleted, ask us as our Privacy Policy explains.

When we may end your account. We may close your account for any reason with 30 days' notice. We may suspend or close it at once if:

• you break these terms in a serious way, for example by selling something listed above or by fraud;
• the law, a regulator or a court requires it;
• IntaSend or Meta requires us to stop serving your shop;
• your use of DukaBot puts customers, other merchants or DukaBot at risk.

While your account is suspended, your shop may not take orders and we may hold cash-outs while we look into the matter. We tell you why, unless the law does not allow it.

Money when an account ends. If we close your account, we send your balance to the M-Pesa number on your account, less the fees you owe and any refunds due to your customers. If the law, a regulator or IntaSend requires us to hold money, we hold it only as long as that lasts. If we cannot pay you, we keep the balance for you and pay it when you claim it.

Fees owed, refunds due and the sections on liability and disputes still apply after your account ends.

Your customers' details (phone number, name, delivery address, orders and payment receipts) are data we process for you. For that data, you are the data controller and we are your data processor under the Kenya Data Protection Act. We use it only to run your shop and our service for you, to meet the law, and to keep the service safe. We never sell it.

• You must have a lawful reason to collect your customers' details and to message them, and you must tell them that you use DukaBot.
• We use service providers to run DukaBot: IntaSend for payments, Meta for WhatsApp messages, DigitalOcean for hosting, and tools for e-mail, error reports and product analytics. Our application server and database are in Frankfurt, Germany, and our file storage is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, so this data is stored outside Kenya. We share with each provider only what it needs to do its job.
• We take reasonable steps to keep the data safe. If we learn of a breach that affects your customers' data, we tell you without undue delay.
• If a customer asks to see or delete their data, we help you answer.
• When your account ends, we keep or delete data as our Privacy Policy says, and we keep payment records for as long as the law requires. You can ask for a copy of your data before you close your account.

Our Privacy Policy covers the data we hold about you as a merchant.

We work to keep DukaBot running, but we provide it as it is. We cannot promise that it will always be available or free of errors. WhatsApp, M-Pesa, IntaSend and internet providers are outside our control.

• We are not liable for lost profits, lost sales, or any indirect loss.
• Our total liability to you for all claims is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.
• That limit does not apply to the money in your wallet: you can still cash it out, less what you owe under these terms. It also does not apply where the law does not allow liability to be limited, such as for fraud.
• Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have under Kenyan law that cannot be taken away.

Kenyan law governs these terms.

If you have a complaint, write to us first at [email protected]. We reply within 14 days and try to settle it within 30 days. If we cannot settle it, either of us may take it to the courts of Kenya.

• Email: [email protected]
• WhatsApp: message us through any active DukaBot shop link and ask for support

We send notices to you at the e-mail address or WhatsApp number on your account.