Adedeji Olowe

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.

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.

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.