In my last post about renaming Trivue to Tagviu, I mentioned having a rough time integrating international payments as a developer based in Cameroon. Let's talk about it.
I tried several popular payment providers and Merchant of Records: Polar, Stripe, Dodo Payments, Lemon Squeezy, Paystack, Flutterwave, and a few others.
The problem was:
A lot of them don't support businesses in many African countries.
Some of the providers that do support a handful of African countries, like Paystack and Flutterwave, currently don't let businesses registered in Cameroon get verified.
So I started looking locally.
I looked for tools built by Cameroonians, or at least providers that allowed operating in the CEMAC region. Anything that could let me accept international card payments while being based in Cameroon.
I found quite a few.
But still, most were built primarily around local payments like MTN MoMo and Orange Money. I even found several that advertised card payments, only for me to sign up and discover that card payments weren't actually available.
And honestly, the quality of some of these platforms was disappointing.
Poor UI, Poor typography, Broken form validations, Weird things happening in the network tab.
Man I'd leave some of these sites thinking: "I know we can do better"
And that got me wondering.
Why aren't we more represented when it comes to global payment infrastructure?
Out of pure fraustration I kept asking; Is it the economy? Regulations? The developers? The market? something far deeper ?
Is it me? Is it you?
At one point I even thought about what it would take to build my own reliable payment platform for African businesses to accept international payments. What it'll take to intergrate with banks like UBA...
I could do it.
But there are a LOT of legal and financial hurdles, potentially very very slow adoption, and I'm gonna be honest:
Do I wish things were in place already ? Absolutely!
But is that what I want to be doing rn ? Absolutely f*ing not.
So, I'm still looking.
I haven't integrated payments into Tagviu yet, but I have a potential way forward.
One way or another, Tagviu and all my SaaS Ideas are getting payments
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