Start Selling Online In Nigeria

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. Having an online shop is a great proposition for businesses that are already doing well on the ground and allows them to extend their sales further with little effort. It is also a preferred avenue for someone looking to start up a new business because it requires less fixed cost investment and can be run from home for those who can not afford to open up an office with all the costs associated with it.

If you would like to list your products/services and sell them online with ease then you will need an e-commerce website . 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. Some excellent open source ecommerce sites to try out when creating your online shop include:

Joomla

Magento

Open cart

Prestashop

Os Commerce

Wordpress  (Woo commerce and eCommerce)

Once you set up your ecommerce site on your desired platform, you then need to work on how your clients will be paying you. This needs you to get a shopping 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. There are various methods which can be used. 

These include: 

GTPAY 

GTPAY is the best bet for any merchant based in Nigeria. This platform links together all 25 banks in Nigeria, thus allowing ease of payments across banks. 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. The key advantage is that you will be collecting payment straight into your Nigeria Bank account. This requires that you have an account with GTBank which is one of the top banks in Nigeria. It will cost a total of N112,500 : N75,000 -merchant registration fee and N37,500 for integration plug-in service that supports most of the popular open source carts mentioned above. http://gtbank.com/gtpay

2Checkout 

If the target of an e-commerce site is a global audience, then the most ideal merchant solution is 2Checkout. It allows for e-commerce owners to get paid in a flexible manner as well as offers owners a MasterCard which can be used to withdraw money from MasterCard branded ATMs worldwide. Some other e-commerce merchants allowing e-commerce sites based in Nigeria which you can try out include NoChex, AlertPay, Plimus and Paypal. One must however comply to the individual requirements stipulated by each of the above players for them to allow your payments be processed by them. https://www.2checkout.com

There are a number of other payment solutions available however if you are looking for a quick start and a clear choice, the two options above are the best answers to your payment questions.