Category: Payment Cards

Adedeji Olowe’s take on debit, credit, and prepaid cards. You could read about technologies, business models, and other industry stakeholders for cards.

Poor Support and Initiatives from Payment Gateway Providers Kills ECommerce in Nigeria

My experiments with Magento and OpenCart revealed a lack of modules for Nigerian payment gateways, hindering e-commerce growth. Providers should offer plugins for popular platforms and improve support to boost online shopping.

In my recent online payment experiments, I worked with both Magento and OpenCart. While Magento is complex enough to make even a bishop go raving mad, it still came with some payment modules/plugins out of the box. Same for OpenCart. Conspicuously missing are the modules from top payment gateways in Nigeria.

From my own firsthand experience, handcrafting APIs for payment is a bore. It has significantly retarded the growth of ecommerce in Nigeria more than anything else.

If you want to accept payment online in Nigeria today, you are limited to payment gateways from:

  • InterSwitch and/or UPSL (ValuCard)
  • Banks and their proprietary systems
  • Other independent providers such as Pay4Me, etc.

Thereafter you are on your own. One, you don’t have any pre-cooked modules or plugins you can easily install on the most common payment applications such as OpenCart, Magento, PrestaShop, ZenCart, etc. and also their integration documentations are lame, non-existent or sometimes downright incorrect. Support is patchy and poor, and they want to charge you for every time you take a breath.

So how can life be easier? Payment gateway providers should make available modules or plugins that can be used for probably the 10 commonest online engines, including the venerable old WordPress and Joomla (yes, some people do use such). Also, they should have a vibrant support system such as an online forum – with sample codes, reviews, user interactions, blah blah blah.
This should create a network effect; as more shops go online, much more will like to go online. Ultimately anyone with a card will always have something to buy online.

Online Payment Sucks

Despite the government’s push for a cashless society, major retailers like DSTV and telcos lack integrated payment options. Swift Wireless excels, showing the need for smarter solutions from industry leaders.

Why isn’t the cashlite breeze blowing over to some of the major retail forces in the industry? I mean the government has stoked the cashless fire but I don’t know if guys over at DSTV are wearing fire-retardant pants or what not.

Ok. This is a gripe but then someone’s got to listen to me.
The other day I wanted to pay for my cable TV and still had to do it over QuickTeller. Given, those dudes have done some job, though it feels pre-historic at times but the gripe is why I have to go over to QuickTeller when I should be able to pay for this right inside my DSTV account? Why hasn’t DSTV integrated payment into their own website and make the customer experience sticky? Maybe this is a jamb question, which I would never know. Last I checked, I did mine eons ago.

Same for MTN and the other clueless telcos, you can’t buy airtime on their websites. They don’t have any mobile app. You can’t type in your card number and get some chatty airtime added as extra-life to your phone to harass some poor souls at the other end of the virtual wire.

Reality is sometimes big society change will only happen when some prime movers get moving. Time CBN and the big ole’ banks work on initiatives that can make impact on the market.

Sorry I forgot, someone got it right. Swift Wireless. Even when your internet subscription is up in flames and you can’t see any cat videos or lulz on the web, the payment gateways still work. Someone apparently thinks in that place but it seems they patented intelligence and MTN and folks wouldn’t pay licensing fee.

How Do I Accept Payments on my Website? Part 5

The adventure with Magento for web payment came to a crashing end faster than I thought. Like my previous post explained, Magento is extremely powerful and highly configurable. However, it doesn’t lend itself to ease of deployment or management.

It has just way too many settings and configurations that could drive even a mad man insane. For the middling developers, the structure is bloated and cumbersome with thousands of files and annoying folder structure.

So I’m giving up on it for a while to try another approach. Maybe it would be osCommerce, OpenCart, etc. my research should tell me. But whether I like it or not, we have to crack this online payment experiment.

In the midst of my frustration, I have left my friend, fellow executive guinea-pig extremely angry and taciturn.

But it seems I’m not alone. As far back as 2009, Magento has been driving people nuts.

How do I Accept Payments on my Website? Part 4

The adventure to put up an ecommerce website has been a very exciting one. Or maybe that’s what I wished for.

I got the website up and running with great support from siteground.com; slapped on an SSL; got a merchant account from the bank and also the integration document.

Then it stopped looking like an adventure.

Magento is powerful, indeed powerful enough to run some of the most complex shopping websites out there. In fact, I have a friend who’s contracted some dudes in India to help him use Magento for an online shopping mall.

Magento has settings for apparently everything under the sun. Getting the basic shop online has been one hell of a job that I’m still grappling with. There are gazillion settings and codes and parameters and yada yada to check and configure.

Or maybe I’m getting old and em, em, gray and this is for script kiddies. Or maybe not.

The good news is I should get this fixed before the end of the week and then we can put a pretty makeup of a nice theme on it.

Until then I need more than 5 truckloads of luck.

How do I Accept Payments on my Website? Part 3

I finally dragged myself out of an immense lethargy to continue with my experiment.

A quick read-up on Magento (trolling the web for reviews) shows that one needs to get a decent hosting package to get the best out of it. I searched for a reasonable hosting (reasonable meaning I wouldn’t be putting up my neighbors for sale to pay for the hosting) and decided on Siteground.com. They have a mix of good pricing and features. Awoof dey run belle!

A background check is important as a bad host can ruin you. If you are not the reading type, trust me, you are on your own.

Before paying, I ran some checks on customer service. This is actually to confirm the high reviews they have online. You can always know the quality of support of any company by trying to chat or talk to customer service. If they treat you less than stellar, ask for the exit.

I was pleasantly surprised by the customer service checks. I tried to pay, but then some dude called me to confirm that realness. I don’t know why; maybe it’s the standard practice or the location of my IP. Anyway, I’m legit, so I paid. The best payment method is using your debit card (credit cards still don’t show up regularly around here). But if your bank doesn’t offer a card (MasterCard or Visa) that can be used anywhere in the world, then you are out of luck.

Alternatively, you could try using prepaid. You can buy a Naira Visa prepaid card from any UBA branch. It costs just N1,500. When you are done with buying whatever you want online, you can still rock the card anywhere in the world. Provided you fund it, that should be obvious.

Setup was easy. They did the installation free of charge, and it was painless.
You also need to slap an SSL on top of the website if any bank would take you seriously. Actually, it is standard that you must have an SSL for a shopping website. Would you shop in a mall when you can get easily mauled? Get it? An SSL cost as much as hosting so, please double your budget.

The next stage would be to get a merchant ID and collection account from a bank. The payment gateway I want to use is called Consolidated Internet Payment Gateway (CIPG). It’s available from some 6 banks or so. It consolidates all the available payment options in Nigeria today, ETranzact, MasterCard, Verve, and Visa, into a single page. The alternative would be to integrate with InterSwitch, ValuCard, and ETranzact independently. Trust me; you will be dead before you are done.

By the way, it is not related to Consolidated Breweries, even though the config can make you feel dizzy sometimes.

That’s enough for today. Once the bank processes the form, we can start with the integration.

Wish me luck.