The payment method you offer shapes who can buy from you, what each sale costs you, and how much work lands on your desk after checkout. Here is how the choice actually plays out.
For a business selling online in Kenya, "how do we take payment" is not a technical footnote. It decides who can buy from you, what each sale costs, how quickly the money lands, and how much manual work you inherit after every order. The honest answer for most businesses is "both", but it is worth understanding why before you pay for either.
What each method actually reaches
M-Pesa reaches almost everyone with a phone, needs no card, and is what most Kenyan customers reach for by default. Cards reach customers who prefer them, and they reach buyers outside the country in a way mobile money does not. If you sell only locally, mobile money alone may be enough. If you want to sell across borders, or to customers who expect a card field, you need both. The right answer is the one that matches who you are actually selling to, not the one with the most logos.
The gateway sits in the middle
A payment gateway is the service that connects your website to the banks and mobile-money rails and confirms a payment succeeded. You do not build this yourself and you should not try. What you are choosing is which gateway, on what fees, with what settlement time, and how cleanly it tells your website that a specific order was paid. That last point matters more than it sounds: a gateway that takes money but does not reliably confirm which order it belongs to turns every sale into a manual reconciliation.
Read the three numbers that matter
- The fee per transaction — a percentage, sometimes plus a flat amount. On thin margins this decides whether a sale is worth making.
- Settlement time — how many days between a customer paying and the money reaching your account. Cash flow lives here.
- What it costs to start and to keep — setup charges, monthly minimums, and whether unused months still cost you.
Before you sign anything
Ask a provider for a worked example on a real order value of yours: what the customer pays, what you receive, and how many days later. A provider who cannot answer that plainly is not the one to build your cash flow on.
What happens after "paid"
A payment is the start of the order, not the end. Your website needs to record which order was paid, tell the customer it worked, and let you fulfil it against a clear record. Build the checkout so that reconciliation is automatic — the site knows payment X belongs to order Y — rather than a spreadsheet you square up at the end of the day. That decision, made early, is the difference between a store that scales and one that generates admin faster than revenue.
If a bank or provider will review you
To be approved for card payments, an acquirer will look at your live site before it says yes. It expects to see a real, identifiable business: your legal name and contact details, clear prices, and published refund, delivery and privacy policies that read like a real business wrote them. None of this is about the payment technology — it is about whether you look like a business worth underwriting. Getting it right is the same work that makes customers trust you, so it is worth doing whether or not a review is coming.