Knowledge Hub

Payment Gateway Integration

Implement Stripe, PayPal, and other processors.

Payment gateway integration lets a website or app accept real payments — cards, bank transfers, mobile money — without building the actual payment processing yourself, which is neither realistic nor safe to do independently. This guide covers how to choose a payment provider and what integration actually involves.

Choosing a Payment Provider

Paystack and Flutterwave — the standard choices for Nigeria-facing products, both supporting Naira natively via card, bank transfer, and USSD, with strong local bank integration.
Stripe — the standard choice for products primarily serving international/US/EU customers, with broad global currency support.
Serving both markets — products with both Nigerian and international customers often integrate two providers rather than forcing one processor to handle both well.

What Integration Actually Involves

Checkout flow — collecting payment details securely (never storing raw card numbers yourself — this is handled by the provider's hosted fields or SDK).
Webhook handling — payment confirmation should come from the provider's server-to-server webhook, not just the browser redirect, since redirects can be interrupted or spoofed.
Reconciliation — matching successful payments to the correct order/subscription in your own database reliably, including handling duplicate webhook deliveries.
Refunds and disputes — building the ability to issue refunds and handle chargebacks/disputes through the provider's API or dashboard.

Common Integration Costs

A standard one-time checkout integration (subscribing to a single payment provider, handling one core payment flow) typically runs $1,000–$5,000 and takes 1–3 weeks as part of a larger project. Subscription billing (recurring payments, plan upgrades/downgrades, failed-payment retry logic) is more involved and typically adds $3,000–$10,000 to a project's scope. Beyond development cost, expect the payment provider itself to charge a per-transaction fee — this is separate from integration cost and worth confirming directly with the provider for your specific volume and currency.

Frequently Asked Questions

No — reputable payment providers handle card data through PCI-compliant infrastructure so your own systems never touch raw card numbers. Building your own card storage is both a serious security liability and typically unnecessary given how payment provider SDKs work.