Author: Gbolade Ogunfowote

4 Best Nigerian Payment Gateways

Payment gateways have simplified the payments in Nigeria. Back in the day before the advent of e-commerce platforms, paying for goods and services involved going through many processes that wasted time and resources. Let me tell you a story. Mr. Lukman is the owner of a printing firm at Somolu, which is the hub of printers in Lagos, Nigeria. He often struggled with customers paying for his services, as time and time again, he delivered his orders without being paid in full.

When a web developer spoke to him about getting a website and integrating a payment gateway, he realized that he didn’t have to go through any stress to get paid for his services. All his customers had to do was input their card details on a platform and voila, he got credited. A payment gateway had done all the heavy lifting for him.

Most payment gateways have plugins that you can seamlessly install if you have a WordPress site, they also have plugins for other platforms such as Opencart, Magento, Drupal etc.

Here are 4 payment gateway platforms you can use for your website.

Paystack

If you are looking for value and quality at the same time, Paystack is a good bet. They are a fast growing payment gateway in Africa and have worked with a number of popular brands. You don’t need to write any code. They also offer subscriptions which is useful if you offer a service and need to bill your customers at certain intervals. Paystack also has zero integrations fees unlike some other payment gateways, which is a major advantage and point of consideration.

Most web developers opt for paystack because of their seamless integration, extensive documentation, and wonderful User Interface. It is also quite easy to ‘Go Live’ with Paystack.

*Go Live refers to moving your account from a test account to a Live Account, this is a daunting process with Interswitch-based payment gateways such as GTPay, Webpay etc.

Note that for business accounts, you need to upload business information such as CAC Documents, ID of business owners and some other information to go live.

You can see how it works in this demo.

Rates: You pay 1.5% + ₦100 for local transactions and the ₦100 fee is waived for transactions below ₦2,500. For international cards, you get charged 3.5% + ₦100 and you get paid in 24 hours. Transaction charges are capped at ₦2,000. Find out more at paystack.com

Rave by Flutterwave

Rave is a payment gateway that allows multi-currency transactions. You can get payments from cards, mobile money wallets, and bank accounts. Implementing Rave is easy, and you don’t have to be a developer to use it. For your checkout page, all you need is to add the code snippet for the page and API keys, and you can use their plugins for easy integration to your website. Like Paystack, Rave doesn’t charge for integration. Go Live is also a breeze with Flutterwave.

Rave is PCIDSS level 1 compliant. Some advantages Rave currently has over Paystack are lower transaction fees and dollar currency support. With Rave, you can list amounts in dollars, a feature Paystack currently doesn’t support. Find out more at ravepay.co

Interswitch Webpay

Interswitch is one of the most trusted payment gateways and is one of the first payment gateway providers in Nigeria. It is used by major brands in Nigerias. They are a secure, reliable and scalable platform for electronic transactions processing.

There is a one-time integration fee of ₦150,000 and for every successful transaction, there’s a transaction fee of 1.5% of the value of the transaction which is capped at ₦2,000.

The major issue with Interswitch is their Go Live process, it is long and complicated. It involves scanning and printing of forms, sending several mails, and filling of several forms again. Note that, it is not for the faint-hearted and can be annoying. Interswitch is a wonderful payment gateway, but they are badly in need of a modern on-boarding process. Another major problem is integration, Webpay and other Interswitch-based payment gateways such as GTPay are not all that easy to integrate and don’t have very good documentation as you would get with Paystack and Rave.

Webpay also doesn’t provide a dashboard for users to view their transactions which is a major turn-off for most businesses.

GTBank GTPay

Guaranty Trust Bank is one of the leading financial institutions in Nigeria, and their payment gateway, GTPay is a secure web payment solution that enables merchants to receive payments from both local and international payment cards.

GTPay is based on Interswitch’s Webpay, so the integration and on-boarding process is similar. It is plagued by most of the issues WebPay has.

Before using GTPay, you should know that they currently charge a one-time integration fee of ₦75,000.

An important advantage of GTPay and WebPay based payment gateways is better security. The lack of a user-dashboard and a seamless onboarding process can be considered a feature and not a bug, cos it makes fraud by much more difficult. A User dashboard can be an avenue to siphon money and defraud a business if it can be accessed by fraudulent people or even the web developer of the business owner.

There are a number of other payment gateway platforms that you can use, but these four are some of the best out there.

If you liked this article, follow us on all social media platforms @MactavisDigital to connect with us for all your website development, Search Engine Optimization, content production, and training needs.

At Mactavis, we help brands, companies and businesses integrate payment gateways on their websites. Check out our portfolio to see some of our web development projects.

June 14, 2018
5 Best Search Engine Optimization Techniques to Help You Rank Higher

Have you ever searched for anything on Google and perhaps other search engines? Well, I bet you have. Everybody uses Google! Research has shown that 60% of search engine users never go to the second page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) and 90% of the people that use search engines only trust the first three results. It is therefore imperative that as a brand or company, you must strive to be displayed on the Top 3 results page when people search for products or services that you offer.

Search Engine Optimization is a very broad topic but this article highlights 5 techniques that can help you rank higher. To be able to gain more website traffic, increase digital visibility and get more traction in the online space, you must invest and continuously improve your SEO.

Here are some of the best practices that can help you become a big brand online. Come with me.

Keyword research

One of the most important things you have to do is to know and uncover words and phrases people are searching for. Most people go online to get answers to a lot of things. Those problems are what your organization, website, and brand are actively looking to solve, and you must have content that guides them properly. You must have primary keywords (keywords that actively portray what your website is all about) and also secondary keywords that share the Intent of the reader.

You can also do this by doing some SERP investigation. Perform a search query in Google, and see the suggestions that follow. They are often EMBOLDENED. It simply shows the most frequently searched phrases as regards to that keyword. You can also use MOZ Explorer and other SEO tools to do keyword research.

Accessible and crawlable URLs

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the address of a world wide web page. It simply means the name of your website. When people use search engines, the search engines have robots that crawl and access websites to understand the content, images, videos and anything you have on the page.

They do this in milliseconds in a way that they put it into their web index. Your URLs must be concise and in sync with what your website is all about.

Your content must be brilliant and unique

The ability to create credible, worthy content is not as easy as people think. You must find people that create quality content. The reason why this is important is that your articles, images, and videos must contain your primary and secondary keywords in a systematic way. When you overuse the keywords, Google detects some anomaly and won’t rank you well.

Therefore, getting keyword-optimized content is very useful. Also, never use content lifted from other websites without stating the sources. That is plagiarism, which Google frowns at.

Link building is important as your content becomes very credible in the eyes of Google. Use social media and other platforms to promote your content. When a particular piece of information has many credible sources linking to it, it helps build page rank and authority.

Optimize your page speed

Page speed is very important as it helps keep readers and users on your site. Ensure that the time your website takes to come up is very fast. When people spend a lot of time trying to access your website, they might not come back. There are numerous page speed insight websites and apps that can guide you in how fast your site comes up. You can use Google Insights for this.

Reduce the sizes of your images. Larges image and videos reduce the speed of your website as it takes longer time for the servers to bring up your site. You can click here to compress images.

Also, ensure that the time taken for people to get things done on your website is minimized. Your User Interface and Experience considerations must be top-notch as it makes the work of the user easier and less challenging.

Use compelling title tags, meta descriptions, and rich snippets

A Meta description is an HTML tag that is a snippet of what your content is about. It is what appears on Search Engine Results Page. It is a snippet of around 155 characters. You must ensure that the keyword you are trying to rank for is in the meta description. How Google displays your results determine whether people will click on your link or another.

For images, Googlebots can’t read pictures and other media in their visual form, therefore it is important that you optimize. What do I mean by image optimization? It means renaming your images in such a way that makes them an authority when people search online. An HTML tag called the “alt” is the best for this. Make sure all your images are original, in high-resolution and are named properly, and that they link back to your website.

Keep working on your S.E.O

While these five techniques are important and critical to improved page ranking on Search Engines, you must keep learning and practising new methods of beating the opposition to that customer.

Search Engine Optimization techniques keep changing from day to day, and you must be in tune with them. Connect with @MactavisDigital across all social media platforms or contact us via www.mactavis.com. We make sure your website can be easily found and accessed through all search engines.

June 7, 2018
4 Best Product Review Plugins for WordPress

People check out product reviews when buying online. It helps them discern easily what products have been vetted by others and is good values for their money.

Reviews mean that people are talking about your brand and that you have built credibility on the online space. In this article, we have selected four of the best product review plugins that you can use on your WordPress site.

What’s the need for a Product Review Plugin?

People check out product reviews when buying something online. A brand that has positive reviews online has higher propensity to attract new customers. Many brands know that having good reviews help to drive sales, and you must also use that platform to help your SEO.

Many WordPress users write product reviews to make money online. Some use affiliate marketing to earn revenue while some get paid directly by the company for the review. You can write your reviews as a blog post.

The problem with this idea is that the blog post doesn’t use the format supported by search engines in product reviews. This means that your article will not be highlighted in search results as a review. For better visibility and traction, your users need to write reviews with Product Review Plugins.

They help your users write search engine friendly reviews that help you rank higher.

Come with me to see 4 of the best product review plugins for WordPress.

WP Product Review Pro

This Plugin has it all, really. There is a detailed settings section that allows you to choose how you want to manage and displays reviews on your website. Select the product review option when writing a blog post and the settings to write your review comes up. Simplify your review into features, add images and more.

You have sidebar widgets to help showcase your reviews, and use it to collect submitted reviews that allow users to add their own rating and reviews in the comments. This plugin also has all reviews displayed in schema.org rich snippet format for maximum SEO benefit.

All in One Schema Rich Snippets

Like the name suggests, this plugin allows users to write different posts using the rich snippet format. This also applies to product reviews. What you have to do is quite easy: Select ‘Item Review’ from a drop-down menu when writing a blog post, and the plugin automatically shows review options like reviewer name, product name, and star rating.

For user experience, this plugin is one of the best. Users don’t have to go through a lot of steps to review products. This software can also be added to articles, products, software and so much more.

WP Review Pro

This is also another excellent alternative when it comes to adding product reviews in WordPress. It is very easy to use and is perfect for beginners. After activation, all the user has to do is write a new post and select the review type. It goes further than the star rating as it supports points and percentages: anyone you feel most comfortable with.

It also supports user ratings that allow users the opportunity to submit their own ratings for a product. For the creative mind, this plugin is perhaps the best as it comes with styling options.

You go to Settings > WP Review page. There, you can choose your own colors for the review box to match theme colors and brand colors.

Rich Reviews

This plugin is free and allows you to add reviews of your own products, services, or website. Your customers can also submit reviews. This plugin uses shortcodes to display reviews, and you can display a review anywhere on your website including posts, pages, and sidebar widgets.

The plugin’s settings panel comes with detailed instructions on how to use the feature of approving each review before publishing it.

We hope this article has been helpful in knowing four of the best product review plugins for WordPress. Do find us on different social media platforms @MactavisDigital to connect with us. Discuss business, make inquiries and ask questions about web development and other digital services that we offer.

June 1, 2018
Step-by-step guide on How to Embed a Facebook Video in WordPress
Many users have wondered if it is possible to embed Facebook videos on WordPress. Yes, it is quite possible and this article will highlight a step-by-step process on how to achieve it. Facebook has introduced auto-play and live video features, of which marketers and stakeholders have been waxing lyrical about.

Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world, and for your website to gain more traction, I would suggest having the knowledge of embedding videos on it. Research shows that people are more drawn to media rather than text, so you can tap into this.

These features help to increase user engagement and overall reach. Embedding Facebook videos on WordPress has become easier with the ever-increasing popularity of Facebook Live and Facebook videos. I would recommend that you should never upload videos to WordPress, but use a video sharing site such as YouTube to do it.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to embed Facebook videos on a WordPress site. Let’s dive in.

Embedding Facebook Videos in WordPress
- The first thing you need to do is to locate the video you want to embed on your WordPress site.
- After doing this, you need to right click on the video or date, and then copy link address.
- Copy the Facebook video URL.
- Visit the Facebook embedded video player website. Scroll down to the code generator section.
- Paste the URL you copied earlier in the ‘URL of video’ field.
- Next, you need to click on the get code button which will bring up a popup showing you two boxes of code.
The first part of the code will have to go in your website’s header section. For this, you have a couple of ways you can achieve this. If you are a very good programmer, good. You can add it to your theme or a child theme by editing the header.php file and then pasting it right after the <body> tag.

If you feel coding is a bore, you can install and activate the Insert Headers and Footers plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.

After activating the plugin, go to Settings on the WordPress Dashboard, then click on Insert Headers and Footers. Paste the code into the footer box. After this, click on the save button to update your changes.

It is very important to note that you only need to add the first part of the code just once. The next time you add a Facebook video, you only need to copy and paste the second part of the code.

Return to the Facebook video embedder page and copy the second part of the code. Your WordPress posts, pages, and sidebars can be used to add this code. However, when adding the code, you need to make sure that you switch to the text editor, otherwise, the visual editor will affect the code.

Visit the website to see the Facebook video in action.

How to Embed Facebook Live Video in WordPress

Facebook Live is the new cool. Connect to a lot of people by going live, and the good thing is that you can do this without breaking the bank. Embedding a Facebook Live video is not difficult. It is the same process as embedding the regular Facebook video, only that the method of getting the URL of the Facebook Live Video is different.

You can’t get a URL for a live video before going live. Pretty straightforward, no complications.
- Once you are live, right click on the date and select copy link address to get the live video URL.
- Go to the Facebook embedded video player website and paste the link into the ‘URL of video’ field.
- The code generator will fetch and display a preview of your Facebook live video. Click on the Get code button to continue and follow the instructions described above to add these codes to your website.
- Once you have added the Facebook live video code to your site, your users will be able to view the Facebook live video directly from your website as well as their Facebook feeds.
If you liked this article on how to embed Facebook videos, please follow us on all our social media platforms @mactavisdigital. There, you get to find out what we are up to, get updates on latest trends in the web development ecosystem and also reach out to us as for business, inquiries, and anything as such you feel we can be of help with.
May 30, 2018