Online Payment Portals for South Africa

Online payment portals for South Africa have often been difficult to find.

PayPal started the industry, and unfortunately didn’t (and still doesn’t) operate in ZAR (South African Rands). It was frustrating and infuriating and limited South African’s ecommerce options tremendously. But fortunately, times changes and a whole lot of online payment portals for South Africa have been launched! Now we have lots to choose from, whatever platform you use to build your website.

Here are the portals we found and have customers using. Please let us know which is your favourite, or which you use?

PayFast

Payfast is possibly one of the most well-known online payment portals in South Africa. offers fast and secure online payments from almost anywhere in the world. Whether you have a website or not, they offer easy, secure, and instant payment processing for South African businesses. In our experience, their support is excellent, and only a phone call away. Every time you accept a payment, they charge an all-in fee for each successfully completed transaction. There are no setup, monthly or hidden fees, and you don’t need a merchant bank account to get paid.

See their fee structure here

Payment Methods
BuyNowPayLater, Cheque & Credit Cards, Debit Card, Instant EFT, Masterpass, Mobicred, SCode, Snap Scan, Zapper

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
Ecwid, Magento, Prestashop, Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce

iKhokha

iKhokha is a South African technology company, co-founded by Matt Putman, Ramsay Daly, and Clive Putman. You can use iKhokha to accept online or in person payments (using one of their three card machines) which are linked to an app so you can keep track of your payments. They don’t require you to sign a contract and their solution is simple, quick to setup, and easy to use. This is an online (and in-person) payment portal worth watching!

See their fee structure here

Payment Methods
Cheque & Credit Cards, Debit Card

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
WooCommerce

PayStack

Paystack lets your customers pay you however they want. Their combination of automated and manual fraud systems also help to protect you from fraudulent transactions and associated chargeback claims. They supply detailed reporting for accounting, reconciliation, and audits, and help you to understand your customers’ purchase patterns and do easy reconciliations with a robust dashboard and easy exports.

See their fee structure here

Payment Methods
Cheque & Credit Cards, Debit Card, Instant EFT, Masterpass, Snap Scan, Zapper

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
Ecwid, Magento, Prestashop, Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce

Yoco

Yoco offers online or in-person payment solutions with their card machines. They boast a 5-minute signup process and promise no subscriptions, no monthly fees, and no set-up costs. You only pay a small percentage of your sales. Yoco transactions are protected by 3D-Secure technology, and their support team is available 7 days a week. They also provide a dashboard so you can oversee your sales and have a collection of free business management tools too.

See their fee structure here

Payment Methods
Cheque & Credit Cards, Debit Card, Instant EFT

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
Shopify, Shopstar, Wix, WooCommerce

TradeSafe

TradeSafe is backed by Standard Bank and provides digital escrow payment services. This means that the buyer’s funds are safeguarded in trust and are released to the merchant once the buyer receives what was ordered. Customers can use up to 5 payment methods: EFT, Ozow, Card, SnapScan and PayJustNow, with more on the way. TradeSafe allows for split payments where you can earn rebates for every transaction processed in a multi-vendor environment. Integration is fast and seamless, and you can be up and running within 30 minutes. They also provide a detailed dashboard for reporting and accounting purposes.

Payment Methods
BuyNowPayLater, Cheque & Credit Cards, Debit Card, Escrow, Instant EFT, Ozow, PayJustNow, SnapScan

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
WooCommerce

Peach Payments

Peach Payments is a payment portal for South Africa that has grown in leaps and bounds. They have a really wide variety of trusted payment methods, so there’s always a way for your customers to pay. They work with the biggest enterprise businesses to the side-hustles next door, across every sector of the economy. They pride themselves on delivering a world-class payment paortal with a seamless and secure checkout, enterprise-grade security, and personalised multi-channel support.

See their fee structure here

Payment Methods
Credit and Debit Cards, Instant EFT, Mobicred, Scan to Pay (QR code), PayPal, Payflex, FinChoicePay, 1Voucher, ZeroPay, Apple Pay, API options

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix, Opencart, Magento, nopCommerce

SnapScan

SnapScan is a smartphone app that’s a contactless, mobile payment solution. It makes it really easy and safe to pay and receive payments in a store, online, at home, and on the go. Your customers won’t need cards, cash, or time-consuming EFTs. SnapScan’s fees are dynamic. They start with a standard rate of 2.95% (excl. VAT). Your transaction fee is based on your previous month’s SnapScan turnover, and will decrease as you grow your business.

See their fee structure here (scroll down the page)

Payment Methods
Download the app and load your credit card in order to pay.

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
WooCommerce, Magento 2, Shopstar, OpenCart, and PayGate. They also offer a partial integration with Shopify.

PayGate

DPO Group is the leading African payment service provider (PSP). They enable businesses and individuals across the continent to accept payments online with all currencies and payment methods, including all major cards, mobile money, and e-wallets. DPO Group currently works with 100,000 merchants, and holds PCI DSS Level 1 certification.

See their fee structure here (scroll down the page to see the 2 available solutions)

Payment Methods
Card Payments, Instant EFTs, PayPal, Mobicred, Zapper, MasterPass, MoMoPay, Samsung Pay

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
Via PayWeb: WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, PayWeb, Ecwid, PrestaShop, OpenCart, CS Cart, nopCommerce, OSCommerce, Zen Cart, Gravity Forms, WHMCS, ZOHO Books

Netcash

Netcash is integrated into a number of free shopping cart plugins, and they also support customised integration. They use 3D security and PCI compliance to reduce both fraud and the chances of chargeback on card transactions. Their gateway is easy to use and completely secure, so customers feel comfortable when making payments. Merchants will get a dedicated Payments Advisor to assist with any support queries.

You’ll need to contact them to ask about their fee structure.

Payment Methods
OZOW Instant EFT, Credit Card, Scan to Pay, Bank EFT, SCode Retail Payments, Visa Click to Pay

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
CSCart, Magento V2, nopCommerce, PrestaShop, VirtueMart, WHMCS Debit Order, WHMCS Gateway, WooCommerce, WPeCommerce, Zen Cart

Zapper

Zapper is a brilliant online payment portal for South Africa! It’s quick and easy and has so many great uses. Zapper’s multi-layered approach to fraud, using industry leading advanced technologies and a team of experts, detects fraud with pin-point accuracy and is proven to reduce the cost of fraud to your business whilst ensuring genuine customers are not rejected or left frustrated. Use the Zapper Merchant Portal to review details of all your customers and transactions, and bring them back with enticing vouchers and reward their loyalty.

See their fee structure here

Payment Methods
Credit Card via Zapper App

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
WooCommerce, Shopify, Ecwid, nopCommerce, and a Javascript SDK for custom solutions.

Ozow

Ozow integrates with a wide range of shopping platforms and gives merchants free transactions for one year or until you make your first million, whichever comes first. That’s a big claim, but they have some very impressive merchants on their books, so they are definitely doing something right!

See their fee structure here

Supported Shopping Cart Platforms
View their supported integrations here.

Mobicred

Mobicred works in conjunction with other payment portals and provides a simple and convenient revolving credit facility that allows customers to safely shop online with more than 4,000 online stores in South Africa. Their Mobicred account allows them to make one single monthly payment for all their online spend.

Particpating Merchants

For any South Africans wanting to sell in a foreign currency:

If you’re a company registered in South Africa then you are not legally allowed to sell to other South Africans in a foreign currency (and PayPal doesn’t accept ZAR). (Whether they catch you doing this or not is anyone’s guess, but it’s still the law.)

Also, any payments you receive from a foreign payment portal (like PayPal) will be in foreign currency, which means you will need to bring the money into South Africa before you can use it locally. In doing so, you will pay both foreign exchange charges and PayPal fees – these charges are expensive.

If you want to sell to South Africans and your company is registered here, it is cheaper to sell to them in ZAR, using a payment gateway that accepts ZAR (eg: on the the payment portals mentioned above). You can then use PayPal to sell to foreigners in USD or some other supported foreign currency.

Please let us know if you have any questions, and which payment portal is your favourite?