Billing your customers is very important. Even more critical is getting paid for those bills. Thanks to the ongoing evolution of the Nigerian payments industry, there are more ways to get paid online and more payment tools and platforms to choose from to help find the perfect payment option for your business — based on how many payments you receive, the type of business you have and, of course, your budget.
Online payments are going to be the future of convenience and security. Online payments will offer businesses a cheaper, faster, and reliable way to do business.
There are more means to get paid online than ever before. As a small business, you want to offer your customers alternative ways to pay you so as to ensure you get paid faster and at the right time. In this post, I will be sharing three (3) basic ways a small business can accept online payment without many hassles.
Also Read: Best Payment Alternative to Paypal for Nigerians.
1. Payment Gateway.
Accepting online payments for small businesses in the past was like embarking on an impossible mission. Thanks to the revolution in the Nigeria #FINTECH industry, getting paid online is getting more easier by the day. Now a merchant in a remote town can set up a web store, accept payments and deliver goods to any part of Nigeria without much stress.
Few payments gateways in Nigeria has gained a lot of popularity and recommendations based on how simple and efficient they are. The very early days of online payment in Nigeria started with more enterprise solutions like Interswitch and E-Tranzact. Later on, a majority of the Nigeria banks started coming up with their own payment solutions (e.g. GT Pay ). With these big players paving the way for the smaller ones, there are a lot of more innovative payments solutions by startup companies that work just fine. Good examples include; Paystack, Voguepay, SimplePay, Amplify and Remita.
As a small business, there are a lot of factors to be considered while choosing any of these available payment solutions which include;
- Pricing and cost of integration.
- Payment flow and user experience.
- Developer friendliness.
A solution that is efficient for a small business will have all these boxes checked. Integrating with payment gateway is only useful for small businesses that sell a product online e.g. E-Commerce stores.
2. Online Invoice.
Ever tried to integrate with an online payment gateway? As it turns out, what should be a simple task is actually quite the nightmare. Most small businesses spend a lot of time and resources in setting up an online payment facility for their business. In a scenario when you don’t have the resources to set up an online payment facility for your small business, using an online invoicing solution with integrated payment solutions come very handing.
More small business owners and freelancers recognise the benefits of moving from manual invoices created in a word processing program and then emailed or faxed to their clients, to online invoicing solutions that speed the process of invoicing and payment. Solutions like this is a perfect fit for the very small business owners because of how easy they are to set-up (you don’t need a developer to send an invoice and get paid online).
A good online invoicing solution should offer more than invoicing and this should always include the ability to accept payment online. Learn more about our solution helps you get paid online with ease.
Also Read: Introducing Payment Link – Share a link and get paid.
3. Payment Link.
Payment Link is a new and easy way to accept payment online (all you have to do is create a link and share the URL with your customers to start getting paid). Your customers can easily pay you by going directly to the link, these links can also serve as an alternative to POS for small business merchants.
With Invoice NG’s newly introduced Payment Link feature, small businesses can easily create a unique payment URL for accepting online payment for each product or services rendered.
Other options and alternative in the market includes Simple Pay’s Simple Link, Payme NG and Paystack Payment Pages.