Category: Payments

Adedeji Olowe’s take about everything payments. You could read about technologies, business models, direct debit, transfers, virtual accounts and other industry stakeholders for payments.

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.

How do I accept payments on my website? Part 2

In my last post, I mused about finding a simple way to accept payments on a website. That is a nebulous statement, and it is as fuzzy as any nebulous cloud could be. Coincidentally one of my friends (not sure if this merchant is actually a friend. Let’s say that’s it) came up to run along on this experiment.

So last Saturday, I locked myself up to decide on what I really want to do. I came up with this chicken list:

  1. This is a fashion website. To sell some pieces of pretty rags to anyone willing to part with cash before seeing the merchandize (merchandize are things merchants sell)
  2. The website must be able to accept all payment cards irrespective of country of issue. If this is not possible, at least we must accept Nigerian plastics.
  3. No additional registration would be required upfront. Just select goods, fish out card, input details, and bingo, goods show up at the door.
  4. The whole shebang shouldn’t cost ten arms and 5 legs.
  5. Must be easy to set up (No Ph.D. in hair-pulling) and to support

Upfront, I have decided to use Magento. Magento is an open-source (read free!) shopping engine that can be easily deployed. Well, that is what another friend who’s used it said. In this business, it is important to ask around sometimes. You can learn shiploads against trial by error.

Magento can be easily hosted, or I can use Magento Go, a simple hosted solution that I can pay per month. I haven’t decided on which to use. While Magento Go is tempting about the ease of deployment, what I need to confirm is if I would be able to muck around the codes for the integration I want to do.

That is another thought for next weekend.

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.

Lagos Cashless Initiative; Strapped to a Whimpering Rocket

The Cashless Initiative should rocket the economy of Nigeria to greater heights.

That was the plan.

Picture the Nigerian economy precariously strapped to the back of a badass rocket standing ramrod straight in the sweltering sun. Yes, the sun in Lagos is something else.

Then the CBN Governor steps forward gallantly to light the rocket with a lighted match (or is it cigarette lighter – now isn’t that dangerous?) expecting a loud boom, a shudder then after the smoke clears the rocket has taken us to nirvana. Ok. That didn’t happen. The rocket whimpered, rose a bit and crashed back with a thud, a thousand pieces of pewter Naira coins scattered in all directions; a lorry load of disappointment plastered on its metal face. Now Sanusi would know how ladies tied to one minute men feel. Utter dejection in the face of needed performance of a life-time.

Allegory aside, everyone knows that cashless initiative is going to be driven largely by POS (not what you think it is – it is Point of sales terminal). POS needs connectivity. Connectivity is only possible with mobile data. That is standard in Nigeria. Anyone who talks of wired broadband for something like POS should be strapped to a gurney at Aro.

That brings us to state of mobile data in Nigeria. This is a market that is practically begging to be exploited and yet the Telcos are not better than POS (the other one). Heard that NIBSS got into bed with MTN and Glo for POS connectivity but all I have gotten are screams of anger by frustrated card holders because POS don’t work well with POS (other one one) connectivity.

Truth is either the Telcos are greedy, myopic or both. A greedy Telco is smart, at least driven by greed to make profit. A myopic Telco could be saved if the CEO could run down to the optician around the corner. But a greedy myopic Telco is an abomination. Heard that there are over 2.5 million Blackberry ping away in Nigeria yet each of them sends at least 10 swear words to their mobile provider each day. Imagine the millions of debit and prepaid cards in Nigeria swiping away and yet the POS wouldn’t work.

What can be done? Maybe the Banks or the POS providers should come together to have a jaw-jaw with NCC (the folks that hand out telecom licenses) to create a company dedicated to providing mobile/wireless connectivity for financial terminals (think ATMs and POS – the real POS not the other one). The company wouldn’t run voice or be commercial and we can free ourselves from the one-minute rockets. At least that is what banks did to create NIBSS, ValuCard and InterSwitch.

Bankers can be quite resourceful when money is to be made.
2 months later, Sanusi is back again. Walks gingerly to the rocket and presses a button after counting down. The rocket let out wailing scream and it lunches Nigeria into the stratosphere of cashless society.