With the increasing popularity of the internet, there is no doubt that it seems to be the new frontier where new successes are to be found in Nigeria. This new frontier is referred to as e- commerce. It refers to doing business over the internet. The beauty of ecommerce is that it opens up your business to both Nigerian prospects as well as the rest of the world. Selling on the internet is not rocket science if you knew your way around the development process. An e-commerce website is what is needed if you desire to list products and sell them online with ease.
To avoid costs that would go into development of the website, it is highly advisable to work with open source platforms. These platforms allow novices to configure them to their businesses and get started with a lot of ease as opposed to having to develop a custom website from scratch which would involve. Open source platforms help you by providing you with a custom built template, thus you need not know much about development to get around them. Excellent ecommerce sites to try out when creating your online shop include:
- Joomla
- Magento
- Open cart
- Prestashop
- Os Commerce
- Wordpress ecommerce
- Woo commerce
Having set up your ecommerce site on your desired platform, you then need to work on how your clients will be paying you. To collect payment you will require merchant account from your bank. A merchant account allows your business to process payments from credit cards online as well as other local forms of payment which you would desire your clients to pay with. The most popular merchant account products available from the various banks and payment gateways serving the Nigerian market are:
1. GTPAY
GTPAY is by far the best, safest and most convenient web payment solution that you should go for in Nigeria. This platform enables merchants to accept payments from both local as well as international cards. It also allows a company to scale its operations to a global scale, seeing that it supports both local and international credit and debit cards. What’s more, it comes with low signup fees, charged at N75,000 and N37500 for integration plug-in service which covers most of the carts mentioned above. For more information visit http://gtbank.com/gtpay
Among its features include:
- International card acceptance: GTPAY accepts cards from most local and international issuing authorities such as Visa, Mastercard, JCB, Interswitch among others.
- Fast processing time: Merchants have their payments processed within 1 business day
- GTPAY monitoring log: This is an online monitoring system that logs in all merchant transactions which can be reviewed at a later date
2. INTERSWITCH
Interswitch offers a secure, scalable and reliable platform that supports payment processing for cross platform compatibility as well as in an offline and online environment. One of the main hallmarks of InternetPay is its Interswitch Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). This application supports various major networks including Mastercard, Verve, China Union Pay as well as other proprietary networks.
The EFT platform is developed through use of relational database technology. InternetPay makes use of open systems architecture thus minimizing expense and ultimately ease of use of the platform.
You can choose from 3 internet payment solutions for your website. These are:
Webpay – web with reporting
This payment platform is integrated in a website and shows the owner what was paid, at what time and which bank the said amount was paid into in real time from any location in the world.
Webpay- web without reporting
This platform is integrated into a website and enables for payment of funds, though it does not offer robust reporting of account activity. This is the most ideal and most common account chosen for most small and medium businesses.
Quickteller
This payment platform works more like a checkout system. When you need to make payment for an item, you have to access a third party website, www.quickteller.com so as to make the payment. Quickteller also allows you to collect payment on your website using its pay with quickteller integration support. For more details the plugins available visit http://quickteller.pluginsprojectangle.com
This payment platform is integrated in a website and shows the owner what was paid, at what time and which bank the said amount was paid into in real time from any location in the world.
Webpay- web without reporting
This platform is integrated into a website and enables for payment of funds, though it does not offer robust reporting of account activity. This is the most ideal and most common account chosen for most small and medium businesses.
Quickteller
This payment platform works more like a checkout system. When you need to make payment for an item, you have to access a third party website, www.quickteller.com so as to make the payment. Quickteller also allows you to collect payment on your website using its pay with quickteller integration support. For more details the plugins available visit http://quickteller.pluginsprojectangle.com
For details on pricing please visit http://bit.ly/interswch
