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.
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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.
