Introducing Paystack Commerce

Paystack believes that with the right tools, African creators can build - and do - incredible things.

Again and again, we've seen our community leverage simple, powerful APIs for Collections, Disbursements, Identity Verification, and Reporting to build disruptive solutions across multiple industries.

Today, we're thrilled to expand those superpowers with Paystack Commerce, a collection of tools that helps African creators bring ideas to market, beautifully.

A brief history of commerce at Paystack

We've always had a number of seller tools on the Paystack Dashboard. Thousands of creators use our Payment Pages, Invoices, and Subscriptions features every month to power sales.

But in 2019, we started to wonder: what would happen if we significantly increased investment in our seller tools, on the same level as our other product lines? This kicked off a company-wide effort to deepen our understanding of the needs of our commerce merchants.

At a roundtable with social commerce merchants, we learned how one food entrepreneur found herself managing a private fleet of delivery motorbikes out of necessity because she had struggled so much with outsourcing delivery.

At the 2019 Holiday Commerce Bootcamp, former Jumia Senior Content Editor (and now Paystack Content Marketer) Temitope Olaleye shared strategies for maximising sales during the massive Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping period.

For the 2019 Holiday Gift Guide, we spent months working closely with 15 of our favourite Ghanaian and Nigerian brands to turn Instagram into a novel pop-up store experience.

And then in 2020, COVID-19 upended the world, creating even greater need and urgency for a new generation of tools to help African brands sell online.

After months of learning and iteration, we're excited to share our vision for online commerce.

New: Sell more with beautiful Product Links

A Product Link is a simple, high converting page for selling one product beautifully.

With a Product Link, you can:

• Design an attractive product detail page with custom background colours, photos, videos, animated GIFs, and detailed product descriptions
• Collect shipping fees for different delivery options, and easily collect delivery addresses and delivery notes
• View and manage inventory and orders (eg. mark an order as delivered, change shipping details, etc)
• Track orders with the recently-announced Paystack Merchant app, and lots more!

See Product Links in action

Here are a few great real life examples of Product Links.

Zivanora is using Products Links to sell the Culla Ear Climbers from her newest collection. This is a great example of how to use video as a selling tool. Special for Paystack community: grab a pair for 5% off, this week only!

Inside The Igbo Kitchen is using Product Links to sell her digital cookbook. This is a great example of how to use Product Links to sell digital products.

Taeillo is using Product Links to sell the Amakisi Table. Pay special attention to how they're using the shipping fee feature to make sure they're able to honour delivery. Special for Paystack community: for this week only, get 50% off delivery fee!

Arami Essentials is using Product Links to sell the Onyx Polish. This is a masterclass in how to use evocative imagery to bring a product description to life. Special for Paystack community: for this week only, get the Onyx Polish for over 5% off!

Learn everything you need to know about using Product Links for your business

There's a LOT you can do with Product Links. Here's a quick overview of how to create one and a more detailed breakdown of the Products page.

If you'd like a live guided tour of this new feature, please register for the How to Sell More with Paystack Product Links webinar, where members of our Customer Success team will do a live demo and answer all of your questions in real time.

Coming soon: The State of Ecommerce in Africa Report

We've learned a lot over the last many months about the ground-truth of online commerce in Africa, and we're compiling everything into a report that will launch in Q3 2020.

It includes over 30 field interviews with merchants and developers across Africa, numerous data snapshots, and a detailed breakdown of the macrotrends shaping online commerce on the continent.

Explore the Commerce Public Roadmap

As we continue to build out Paystack Commerce, our product philosophy is shaped by four promises. When you use Paystack Commerce tools...

More customers will find you in more places: Distribution can make all the difference. We're obsessed with helping creators get in front of more customers in more places.

When they find you, we'll convince more of them to buy: Your selling pages should work as hard as your best employee. We design them to make sure that almost everyone who visits your page converts to a customer.

When they buy, they will place larger orders: We'll give you proven promotional tools to nudge customers to make bigger orders, every time.

And they will become loyal, repeat customers, for life: We'll help you build personal, intimate relationships with each customer, and keep them coming back again and again.

To make good on these promises we must make sure at all times that we're solving the most important problems for African creators, and that we have a deep understanding of those problems.

This is why we've made our Commerce Product Roadmap completely public.

We hope that this helps establish a strong feedback loop that results in iterative improvement over time.

Common questions

Is Paystack pivoting away from payments?

No. Payments will always remain the beating heart of all Paystack's product offerings. Paystack Commerce is the fifth addition to our family of solutions, joining tools for Collections, Disbursements, Identity Verification, and Reporting.

How much does it cost to use Paystack Commerce tools?

Paystack Commerce tools are completely free to use. We only charge a transaction fee on each successful sale, so as always, Paystack only makes money when you make money. This is our current pricing.

I have a feature suggestion. Where do I send it?

Is there a challenge you'd like Paystack Commerce team to help solve for you, or a feature suggestion you'd like us to consider? Kindly email it to [email protected] and we'll let you know whenever it goes live.

Sell more physical and digital products online

Paystack Commerce is for creators who care about community and craft.

We believe that African creators deserve access to the very best seller tools on the planet, and we're on a mission to provide every resource that makes it possible to do more, and dare more.

Please let us know if you have any questions, and definitely explore our public roadmap and let us know what you think. Thank you, and we can't wait to see what you build!