Erroneously a lot of writers think they need no technical skills like e-commerce, to navigate content creation and the marketing space. Paystack is one tech space giant you don’t want to ignore. Every startup business needs to read this.

A few days ago, I decided my payment gateway on cfwriterz and my blog had frustrated me enough. I used to think one day I would just write a book and start selling it. That some publisher will find me out and I won’t even raise a finger. Reality hits when you write for the first time and no one really cares. That never happened so I discovered content marketing online. This new pathway to my dreams was however limited by payment gateways.

It’s even worse when you have a new business that has a really appealing story but all you get are social shares. If I could read minds, I would bet you also want to sell online. You don’t want to just post stories on Facebook and IG, you want to convert to cash.

E-commerce is a broad subject that a lot of businesses have very little grasp of. Back to my story about last week. I had complained bitterly to voguepay for a long time about different difficulties I had with their platform. Top among my grievances:

1. Excessive charges: They even charge you fees to verify an account. Every transaction coming in or going out attracts a fee.
2. Unfriendly UI: the user interface (UI) suffers a lot from design and user friendliness.
3. Poor Reporting: The view of the dashboard doesn’t allow you an easy way to see the summary of every fee. Charge or returns are logged behind the scenes. You simply have to accept whatever balance you see in your dashboard.
4. Failed Transactions: Voguepay transactions returned too many failed transactions. I am not sure if this was a fault on their part or on the part of customers but one would expect them to review and fix such recurrent issues.

These are a few reasons why I had to make a quick shift. The main reason I chose to work with voguepay as at the time I created the account was because there was no reasonable alternative. It was important for me to have a payment gateway for my ebooks and for the literary store I had launched some years back. Paypal had blocked out Nigerian users for years so the only one I could use was voguepay.

Paystack had also been around by that time but Voguepay had an upper hand. Voguepay allowed you to integrate your website using a simple WordPress plugin. In order to use Paystack, you either had to learn some code or hire a developer. Paystack UI was impressive and I truly wanted to see how I could use paystack but I  had a few challenges. Paystack also had a massive and widespread usage, the payment pages allowed business startups to receive payments without having a website. However, I didn’t have the patience or time to learn the coding process nor did I have the funds to pay a developer. I wanted to use my sites so I opted for voguepay.

This began my ordeal with voguepay. I lost a lot of transactions, had money deducted without rectification. Then, I waited for months hoping voguepay would address the issues. I just continued to receive promotional emails without getting a response. I finally decided to leave a really scathing review on their Facebook page. A few hours after this review, Voguepay refunded to my account. However, I had decided to revisit paystack. Fortunately Paystack has designed their own wordpress plugin. This makes integration so simple. Also for activating my account, I had a consultant responding to my queries approximately within 24-48 hours. Maybe a live chat could improve their service but so far my experience has been superb.

I immediately did a new setup for my books on this blog, and also fixed cfwriterz. The two platforms are functioning seamlessly, with secure payments.

Note at this point that since I moved to South Africa, I have discovered that here we have a lot more alternatives for payment gateways but most are quite expensive to maintain. The integration process also requires a lot of paperwork which means verifying gateways cannot be done directly online. If I had a South African client, I would recommend PayPal integration for them because they are still allowed on the PayPal platform. I hope this article was helpful, you are free to share with your friends who have problems selling online.