One of the most crucial parts of your online store is the payment gateway. It ensures your store runs like a well-oiled machine, facilitating payments between consumers and businesses across all economic sectors.
A payment gateway's job is to securely validate the customer's payment details, ensuring that funds are available in order to allow merchants to be paid.
As a South Africa online merchant, you have a handful of options when it comes to payment gateways – each with their own list of pro's and cons. With this list, we hope to narrow down your choice so you can get your idea out there sooner!
PayFast
PayFast is one of the top payment gateways for online companies in South Africa. Their system allows merchants to accept payments worldwide in a matter of seconds.
One of their strong points is their flexibility when it comes to website integration. As a developer, the headache of getting some payment gateways up and running on a custom-built website is all too familiar. Luckily PayFast offers complete integration flexibility, letting you add it onto existing shopping cart systems or fully custom sites like we mentioned.
PayFast has partnered with the biggest eCommerce platforms so merchants can easily activate PayFast as their payment solution. As such, PayFast offers the most extensive coverage of platform integrations in Africa and also has a library of developer documentation to assist with custom integration.
Merchants also allow their customers to pay with their preferred payment option, as PayFast supports all popular payment methods.
Keeping all of the above in mind, you can see why PayFast has quickly become the go-to payment facilitator for online businesses in Africa.
PayFlex
Simply put, PayFlex is a buy now, pay later payment solution for both online or in-store merchants.
This payment flexibility is valuable as a store owner, as it not only helps you attract and keep customers around – but it also ensures that you get paid quicker.
True to Payflex's slogan, “Shop Now Pay Later” after the initial deposit, the rest of the total amount is paid in 4 equal increments over 6 weeks. But what's the catch? These payments have 0% interest, and Payflex has no hidden service fees, admin costs, or shady agreements.
Ideally, you'd be looking at using PayFlex alongside one of the other options on this list – as not every customer would want to pay in increments, and having a variety of payment options is always a good idea.
Peach Payments
Peach Payments is a trusted African payment gateway focusing on simple eCommerce integrations and personalized multi-channel support.
The company recognizes that more than 80% of eCommerce traffic comes from mobile devices; thus they ensure their widgets are mobile-responsive and native SDKs for iOS and Android ensure you are mobile-ready.
Peach Payments also allow merchants to further improve their user experience and conversion with the company's Javascript widget, which embeds on the merchant page. This enables customer data to be stored in the Peach Payments vault to implement recurring and one-click payments for customers in the future.
Peach Payments offers easy integration for the most popular eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.
Peach Payments provides a web-based interface to view your payment history that displays their pricing model (which includes a flat fee per payout.)
Yoco
Yoco, popularly known for its card machines – also has an equally popular online payment option. The payment gateway plugin from Yoco makes processing eCommerce sales a breeze. ( Offering integration support, your store runs on Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, or Shopstar.)
All transactions are kept track of in your Yoco Business Portal, alongside your Yoco Point of Sale (card, cash, AFT, mobile payments, and more) dealings. This is useful for tracking weekly and managing every aspect of their business. The Business Portal even allows Point of Sale users to edit products from their inventory, the price of their products, staff access, and more.
Mobicred
Mobicred is an online payment platform in South Africa that allows customers to buy your products on credit, and Mobicred will provide the financing. This comes in handy if your store stocks expensive products, as your clients will often prefer to finance these rather than flat-out purchase them.
Mobicred has a flat commission charge of 3.5% per transaction. This charge is the only cost to the merchant for a sale made through Mobicred. Of course, your client also has to pay the cost of the credit if they choose this solution.
One super helpful feature is that Mobicred is available through other platforms mentioned earlier in this article, namely Payfast and Peach Payments. When you are already using one of these payment gateways, you simply need to enable Mobicred as one of your payment options.
PayGate
Another widely-accepted payment gateway in South Africa is Paygate. Paygate is owned by the DPO Group, like Payfast.
Similar to PayFast, PayGate allows you to receive payments through many channels. You can accept secure online card payments worldwide through Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and PayPal.
For online merchants, PayGate offers two seperate packages. Firstly there's the PayGate Switch package – this allows you to be paid in real time, however it requires you to have a registered merchant account. This package is ideal if you have large order volumes because it has the lowest base transaction fee at 0.25% per transaction.
Secondly, you have the option of using PayGate plus. You do not need a merchant account for this option, and funds are settled within 72 hours with a 3.5% transaction rate.
PayGate supports most popular eCommerce platforms. The list includes WooCommerce, Shopify, Ecwid, and others. An API also enables custom integrations.
Conclusion
Picking the best payment gateway in South Africa is vital for the success of your business. The most important to consider when picking an option, is the volume of orders you will be processing – and the transaction percentage on these orders that the processor will deduct.
Hopefully using our guide, you'll be able to pick the best solution for your business!
