These Questions can Help You when Choosing an Online Payment Gateway in Nigeria

If you run an online business in Nigeria or you are planning to setup one, you know you need a payment gateway to process your payments, you probably even have some services in mind already. What you might not know is what exactly a payment gateway is or what you even need to consider in choosing one, considering there now seems to be a number of options. On the other hand, you probably heard a friend, colleague or you read a blog post talking about how annoying the online payment space in Nigeria still is, you might get overwhelmed or confused. Hopefully, this short post will help you understand what a payment gateway is and what you need to consider in choosing a payment gateway in Nigeria.

A payment gateway in simple terms is an application or service that allows you to securely request and accept electronic payments for your products and/or services into your bank. This could be using cards, mobile money or internet banking. The payment gateway verifies that your customer information is correct, that their payment method is able to fund their purchase, confirms the purchase and does some other things too long to list. Companies that offer this services are called different things depending on who you are speaking with, ranging from payment gateways to payment service providers, to payment processors, payment aggregators, etc. There are some differences between these different nomenclatures but that is a topic for another post. This is a very basic version.

In choosing a payment gateway in Nigeria, there are a few questions you want to answer and ask your service provider based on your business:

• What do you sell?
• What are your requirements?
• Does the payment gateway do what your business needs?
• Does the payment gateway support the payment methods your target customers use?
• Does the payment gateway support your pricing and revenue model?
• Is the payment gateway supported on the platform you have used to build your ecommerce site?
• Do you want customers to enter their payment details directly on your site or not?
• What are the fees and are there hidden ones? Is there a setup fee + settlement fee +?
• How long does it take before you are settled?
• How secure and stable is the payment gateway?
• Do you need to accept international payments?
• Are you tied to a long contract and do you have to pay a termination fee?
• Is your business a “high risk” business?

This list is by no means exhaustive but answering these few can help you discover other things that I might not have covered. I hope the answers go a long way in helping you make the decision about which payment services provider is ideal for your business.