In 2020, the South African e-commerce market grew by 66% and is now projected to be worth R225 billion by 2025. As small businesses enter digital commerce, so does the search for online payment methods that offer security and reliability at a pace that maintains realistic profit margins. Now, fintech firm iKhokha hopes to bridge that gap with its first foray into online payments.
Known for its card machines, iKhokha is now venturing into e-commerce with the launch of the iKhokha payment gateway. The payment solution is the first in a series of products from the stable of iK Pay Online, a proposed suite of e-commerce solutions for small businesses. According to Andrew Roy, iKhokha’s product manager, the move to online payments grew out of a need to enable merchants to process payments for all facets of their business under one iKhokha umbrella.
Roy says it’s part of a larger e-commerce strategy. This is the first in a series of products that we will be developing over the next five years. We’ve found that the majority of our merchants are WooCommerce and WordPress users, so we thought that was a good place to start. Although identifying the opportunity was the first step, iKhokha still had to allocate the necessary resources, improve skills and complete the construction of the online payment gateway within a tight deadline.
Roy says: They not only built the product, they also built the team. They ensured the team composition had the full-stack development skills needed to bring the product to life. It was really about bringing team members to the heart of the project and empowering them to quickly contribute to the solution. The result is a WooCommerce and WordPress compatible payment plugin built in-house in just under nine months.
Roy says they built a microservices-based payment architecture that included integrating with their acquiring bank to process payment messages and creating the test environments needed for the solution. Safety is their top priority. They needed to ensure their solution was PCI compliant and 3D secure. They also had to ensure their architecture could accommodate large volumes to accommodate their dealers.
To test the solution in a real environment, the iKhokha team contacted well-known e-commerce merchants in their database and offered them the lowest transaction fees in Africa to join the beta program before launching it. Roy added that they had identified a beta group from a small subset of merchants who were being offered lower transaction fees to test the solution. They then made a small number of iterative improvements over time until they felt they had received enough feedback to be confident in the product’s robustness and security.
Recently released in beta, the WordPress payment gateway plugin has already processed over a quarter of a million rand in business transactions. iKhokha aims to increase product adoption in the coming months by offering small businesses competitive transaction prices, enabling them to sustainably participate in the digital economy and benefit from the growth of e-commerce.
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