Month: June 2012

How do I accept payments on my website? Part 1

I have had the misfortune of having to explain to a few of my friends over the last few weeks that selling cards (or urging customers to part with their cash using plastics) are not the same as accepting payments on websites.

Nigeria is going through a financial transformation where the CBN itself is at the forefront of electronic payment. That really sucks. I mean, CBN? What about all the fancy banks who blow their hollow trumpets about being the first in this or that.

Back to my rants.

The big question is if I were to have a website today, how do I get my customers, or visitors, or maybe church members to pay for something online? Those were actually the questions my friends wanted answers for. Nobody really asked me to go into a sugar-fueled ranting about nothingness.

So, in my next post, we would walk that journey together hoping to find where it leads us.

Monkey Business

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced that he would buy monkeys for $10.

The villagers went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10. As monkeys became scarce, he upped the price to $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers. Soon the supply diminished again.

The offer rate increased to $25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $100! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.

In the man’s absence, the assistant said to the villagers: “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $75 each and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $100 each.” The villagers brought out their life savings and bought all the monkeys.

Thereafter, they never saw the man nor his assistant again—only monkeys everywhere!

Another Weekend Crash

After getting a 5+ year respite from plane crashes, Nigeria was again thrown into turmoil last weekend. First a Nigerian cargo plane went down in Ghana, then a suicide bomber and worst of it all, a Dana Air (Flight 992) plane fell out of the sky on a building minutes to landing.

Sad indeed.

One curious thing about this though, the last major air disasters in Nigeria all happened on a weekend. Check this out.

Could it be that everyone involved with air safety just tunes off during the weekend, thinking only of the “miliki” ahead?