TechCabal in partnership with Access Bank and PayWithCapture recently hosted the second edition of its Africabeta conference, with the theme: “Fixing online payments in Nigeria”.
The event which was held on Saturday, January 30, 2016, at The Social Place, in Victoria Island, Lagos, witnessed the enthusiastic turn out of on-line merchants, Payment service providers and several other stakeholders in the Nigerian technology industry.
In order to come up with solutions to the difficulties Nigerians currently face when making online payments, the event was divided into two panel discussions – one for the merchants and the other for the payment experts.
The merchants’ panel comprised of Honey Ogundeyi, Founder/CEO of Fashpa; Oluyomi Ojo, Founder/CEO of Printivo; Chinedu Azodoh CEO of Max.ng and Emeka Mordi, COO of Spinlet. All of them spoke frankly about the practical realities and challenges that they all faced in receiving on-line payments in Nigeria.
The experts’ panel on the other hand comprised of JR Kanu, Associate Director, Payments and Digital Goods at Konga.com, Ope Adeoye, an Interswitch Limited senior executive and Joyce Kim, Executive Director at the Stellar Development Foundation.
Both panels were moderated by Oo Nwoye, founder and CEO of Callbase.
The merchants spoke about their experiences running online businesses in Nigeria and they all lamented the difficulties they face with the pay-on-delivery option, which most Nigerians that shop online prefer.
The experts however highlighted the fact that e-commerce was relatively new in Nigeria and that only a small fraction of Nigerians who can browse the internet, have active cards with which to make payments on-line. He also stressed the need for merchants to collaborate in order to help increase the number of active card users. In his words, “There are 200,000 active cards in Nigeria, as opposed to 97 million internet users, to close the gap between the 200,000 active cards, and the 97 million mobile internet users, merchants need to collaborate”
In the end, both the merchants and experts agreed that a big part of bringing more purchase intent online, is educating the end users about online payments. Earning their trust with excellent service delivery, refund policies and best in class dispute resolution were also among the major points raised. Also, merchant input needs to inform the solutions that payment service operators build.
The event also included a Q&A session, a product demo by PayWithCapture, as well as drinks and networking.