The Problem We Were Actually Solving
We were trying to build a platform that made it easy for African digital creators to sell their courses, ebooks, and music online. But our platform's payment gateways were failing, resulting in frustrated users and lost sales. We thought our problem was with our users, but it turned out that the issue was with the payment providers.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
We tried using PayPal's "Borderless Payments" feature, thinking that it would solve our problem. However, we quickly realized that it was not enabled for our users' countries. We then switched to Stripe, hoping that their more robust infrastructure would work. But Stripe's "Risk and Compliance" team flagged our users' transactions as "high-risk," effectively blocking them. We tried to work around this by implementing additional verification checks, but it only made things worse.
The Architecture Decision
After weeks of debugging and trying different approaches, we finally decided to abandon the popular digital service providers and build our own payment processing system using Adyen and Paystack. Adyen's global reach and Paystack's expertise in African payment systems made it possible for us to process transactions from users in over 20 African countries. We also implemented a fallback system that used local payment methods like mobile money and bank transfers, ensuring that our users had a seamless payment experience.
What The Numbers Said After
After implementing our custom payment processing system, our transaction success rate improved by 80%. Our users were no longer facing payment failures, and our sales increased by 25%. We also saw a significant decrease in support tickets related to payment issues. The numbers were clear: our homegrown solution was working, and it was time to let go of the limitations of the popular digital service providers.
What I Would Do Differently
In hindsight, I would have invested more time upfront in researching the limitations of popular digital service providers. I would have also considered using local payment providers from the start, rather than trying to work around their limitations. But I learned a valuable lesson: when it comes to building a platform that serves a specific region or community, you can't rely on generic solutions. You need to build a solution that is tailored to the specific needs of your users, and that requires a deep understanding of the underlying technology and infrastructure.
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