14 Feb Five Things We Do for Our Multinational eCommerce Merchants to Make Online Payment Across Africa a Pleasant Experience!
I was just thinking through some of the online payments benefits our multinational merchants are enjoying with us and thought I’d do a high level for eCommerce merchants looking to expand across Africa. Africa can be a tough place to set up and get paid due to its fragmented nature in geography, jurisdictions, languages and culture, payment systems and government legislation. 1. Let’s start with requiring a legal entity in country. Africa is a continent and not a country (54 countries) and obviously it is not practical for merchants to set up a legal entity in every country that they would like to sell and get paid in. In most cases we can be your local legal entity representative for payments as we have for eg legal entities in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa (and Europe and UK) which can facilitate payment collection and repatriation of funds for you. 2. Secondly it woulds not be practical for each of our merchants to open a bank account and merchant account in every country they operate in so we use aggregator accounts to receive online payments which can be repatriated to merchants on a regular basis, saving you admin, time and cost. 3. Thirdly lets talk about repatriation of funds. It would be very complex for you as a multinational merchant to deal with the anomalies of the various jurisdictions, for eg Nigeria with its Naira liquidity challenges and South Africa with its capital controls. We are experienced with the anomalies of each of these territories and can give you a smooth ride when it comes to getting your money back to the home office. 4. Split payments are often a challenge for merchants these days with the sharing economy and shopping aggregators like Travelstart, Booking.com, Uber, Nutickets. Because we receive the monies, our treasury can easily do payouts for you locally to your service providers and pay you the profit, balance or commission based on your mandate. 5. Integrating to and supporting multiple payment methods can be a big problem for merchant dev. You know the problem - the dev queue is always longer than can be implemented to make business sense. We have a number of payment methods behind one or two APIs and we have arrangements for payment using all the key mobile money service providers (like M-Pesa, Airtel Money, MTN Money, Vodafone Cash, Tigopesa) and banks all over the continent so you have a simply clean interface and we take care of the complexity behind the scenes so you can focus on what you do best and we take care of the money. There are lots more benefits but those are the ones we are seeing our multinational service providers enjoying recently. Hope you enjoyed that! Services include: THANK YOU - THE TEAM AT AFRICAN PAYMENT SOLUTIONS