Online payment platforms in Nigeria

There is a huge number of Nigerians now using the internet and while some websites are highly visited just for social networking, a growing number of others are mostly e-commerce based as they provide valuable services and products to Nigerians who want to buy online.
There are quite a number of products and services being offered by e-commerce based Nigerian websites and this ranges from web hosting, web designing, domain registration, on-demand videos, online advertising, e-books, books, CDs and so on all in a bid to make money online. The bottomline is that all these web merchants had to adopt a means of receiving payments on their websites and so needed to set up a payment platform.
Here are couple of payment methods used by Nigerian online merchants in receiving payments online:

- Direct bank deposit
- eTranzact
- Interswitch
- 2Checkout
- Alertpay
- Softpurse
- VTN
- Fastecash
and a couple of others

Comments:
Direct bank deposit: This can occur before of after and online order, when the buyer is directed to make a payment into the merchant's bank account and nofigy him by sms, web or some other means. This method is the easiest to set up and it is mostly used by new web merchants but it is also slow in executing orders as well as being cumbersome assuming seller has to manually confirm bank deposits for more than a thousand clients.
It is mostly used by information marketers and web hosts.

- Etranzact and Interswitch.
The start-up fee for setting up a payment platform on this brands can be as much as N150,000 per year and als also has some usage charges. This is a major payment platform used by bigger corporations in Nigeria and currency is normally denominated in Naira. Once the merchant makes an application to the providers, they receive set up instructions in order to set up processing forms, linking them to the brand's payment gateway. Etranzact and Interswitch payments platforms normally require debit cards.

- Alertpay and 2checkout:
There are owned by foreign countries and they are respected brands the world over and the currency is mostly denominated in dollars. Both Alertpay and 2checkout allo merchants to be abel to receive payments with credit cards after a series of credibility checks. While 2Checkout is mostly used for selling and business oriented, Alertpay works very much like Paypal and allows users to send and receive money online to just friends without it being just for business.

- VTN, Fastecash and Softpurse
These three are growing Nigerian companies that allow user to load funds with naira using bank deposits or the brand's voucher. Users can also send and receive funds online to another member, store funds as well as withdraw from your funds. It is denominated in naira and is gaining ground by smaller web companies in Nigeria