Payment Gateways for a South African Online Store Print

What a payment gateway does

A payment gateway is the service that takes money from your customer's card or account and gets it to yours, securely, without your store ever touching the raw card details. Your store hands the customer to the gateway, the gateway handles the sensitive part, and it reports back whether the payment succeeded. Choosing one, and connecting it properly, is a step every online store has to get right, and in South Africa the choices are specific to us.

The main South African options

• PayFast is the most established local gateway, handling cards, instant EFT, and mobile options. It is widely trusted by South African shoppers, which matters, a familiar payment screen reduces abandoned checkouts.
• Paystack is a strong and increasingly popular option, handling card payments cleanly, and worth considering alongside PayFast.
• PayPal remains useful if you sell internationally, though it is less commonly the primary choice for a domestically focused South African store.

You are not limited to one. Many stores offer a card gateway alongside plain bank EFT for customers who prefer it, and giving people the payment method they already trust is one of the simplest ways to convert more sales.

WooCommerce and gateways

WooCommerce has broad gateway support, and the major South African providers offer their own WooCommerce plugins, so connecting PayFast or Paystack to a WooCommerce store is a matter of installing the provider's plugin and entering your merchant credentials. It is well-trodden ground, and doable yourself by following the provider's own setup guide.

ThirtyBees and gateways: where we come in

ThirtyBees is where South African store owners often hit a wall, and it is worth explaining why. ThirtyBees is a fork of PrestaShop 1.6, and while PayFast provides a module for PrestaShop, they decline to support it on ThirtyBees, they see the fork and stop there.

So we built our own. We have coded a PayFast gateway module for ThirtyBees from scratch, and we give it away for free. It does properly what the official route will not: connects a ThirtyBees store to PayFast cleanly and reliably. If you are running ThirtyBees and need PayFast, you do not have to solve this yourself, the module exists because we needed it and decided everyone else should have it too. Our article on the ThirtyBees modules we have built covers it and the others alongside it.

A word on security and trust

The reason gateways exist is so that you never store card details, and that is a feature, not a limitation. It means the heavy security and compliance burden sits with the gateway, whose entire business is handling payments safely, rather than with your store. Your job is simpler: keep your store's software updated, run it over a secure connection, which your hosting with us provides automatically, and let the gateway do what it is built for. Our article on whether our billing system is secure explains the same principle from the customer's side, and it applies to your store just as it applies to us.

Good to know

Connecting a gateway is self-doable, and the providers document their own setup, so if you enjoy that kind of task, go for it. Where store owners hire us is for the certainty: as part of our paid install and configuration service we activate and test your chosen gateway so that the first real payment is not the first time you find out whether it works, and for ThirtyBees we bring our own PayFast module to the job. If you would rather it were simply done and confirmed working, get in touch. Either way, test a live transaction before you open for business, a gateway that looks connected and a gateway that has actually taken a rand are not the same thing until you have proven it.