₦airaland Forum

ojochidem: @Lojik, I really love your open-mindedness. You have given out great tips that others will not want to share, thinking they are giving their competitors an edge.

Great Job, once again.

Thanks man.
I love those who dare to start something (Competitive or not). If we had more people like the poster in Nigeria, we would not have had so much unemployment.

ActiveMan: I WILL BUY YOUR COMPANY VERY SOON JUST WATCH OUT
great tips

I'm a business man and anything is possible.
I'll be waiting.

I forgot to talk about servers and backups. Oops!

Simple tips for you:

1. Avoid anything open source for your server-side. I recommend that anything that has to do with money be built from ground up. If you embrace any open source or off the shelf script as part of your solution, you are likely to inherit bugs or security loop holes that may be discovered in such script.

2. Security is everything. Its either you have in-house hackers or you outsource periodic penetration testing to competent hackers.

3. Framework. How many frameworks have you built/worked with in the past? Experience will go a long way when you have to build a framework for your payment processor.

4. Legal. The software aspect of payment processing is just one part. You must have an in-house lawyer or a retainership agreement somewhere. You can't deal with banks, merchants, buyers and card issuers without taking your legal aspect seriously.

5. Account. Get an accountant to be part of your team before software planning stage. There's more an accountant will tell you in a single meeting that will save you years of mistakes and regrets.

6. Workflow: Staff, staff, staff. You need not only to get competent staff, but also insure the staff that effects your withdrawals. GTAssure (Now Mansard) offers an insurance policy that caters for situations where certain staff with access commit fraud on merchant's money. I have forgotten what the insurance is called.

7. Office planning: Since you are going into a multi-million Naira industry, it is a good idea to pre-plan your recurrent office expenditure. See explanation below:

7a. Power: You might end up running generator 24/7. Plan alternative power source from start. We have a solar backup plan at VoguePay but it is only there as a last resort. Nepa, Generator and laptop battery may not be enough for a serious payment gateway.

7b. Gadgets: Forget using desktops at all in Nigeria. We use a mix of tablets, High end android phones and samsung solar netbooks at Afrisoft as official staff gadgets. They all can go up to 14 hours in case of any unforeseen power calamity.

7c. Internet: This is the worst part. We have 3 internet strategies and it still doesn't seem enough. 1st plan is to use a dedicated internet access in the office for everyone. 2nd is to provide personal internet access for every staff that can be used when office internet fails or when they need to work outside the office. 3rd plan is to have an unused telecom bundle subscription as a last resort in the office if the 1st 2 fail (In some cases, this has been our saving grace for customer support).


8. Funding: At least, for the first 6 months, don't plan to fund a payment gateway with the proceeds you get from it. Have a budget and make sure you have 6 months to 1 year operating cost in your bank account before you start. This will definitely be in millions but you will be glad you did. It will pay off in the long run.

9. Developers: Don't ever build a payment solution by outsourcing development. You need in-house software development team. Don't use only salaried employees. If you are not an experienced developer, get one as an executive director (Shareholder, member of board of directors and also C-Level executive). This will guarantee that the lead developer is in it for more than the money. Its his company too and he shares the Vision. Nothing is more disastrous than your lead developer quitting on you when you are in crisis.


You may not have everything at once, but trust me, it doesn't mean you cant get everything. Rome was not built in a day. In the long run, you will be glad you took the right steps than jumping in and then trying to do damage control later.

I hope these tips help. Other people may share more.
**I forgot to write advert and marketing budget.

Voguepay offers that service via several methods:

1. Login to VoguePay and do it from your account
2. Use SMS (TEXT DIRECT) feature to withdraw money into any account.
3. Use the Command API to do it from your own APP or website
4. Use the VoguePay mobile Apps to do it.

@yawatide,
I can't believe you actually googled that up. Where did you get so much spare time from?

I think a lot of the hotlisted cards may have been cleared now.
I had the same problem with my mastercard and it is working now. A friend also tried his previously hotlisted mastercard and it worked.

Do you want to start an SMS business in Nigeria and make fortunes?
Industry expert reveals everything you need to get started…… the right way

One of the most lucrative online businesses you can do in Nigeria today is the Bulk SMS business. With a little work on your part, you will realize that the sheer numbers of people who will require your services are many. This is because more and more SMS messages are sent as days pass by and in about a year, some SMS website owners have grown from about 20,000 monthly SMS volume to over 8 million monthly SMS volume. When you sell at N5 per SMS unit, you make an income of N10,000 to N1Million per month.

As easy as it may sound making money from the business, your success depends on a lot of factors which may be out of your control especially if you don’t know how to develop the application and manage a website of such technical complexity. The real cost of developing an application and managing a payment gateway for SMS website is huge and is not affordable if you are a small business owner.

You can get the important things you need to know at: http://lekeojikutu.com/my-blog/113-things-to-note-before-starting-bulk-sms-business

If its free, it's not going to be unique.

Do you want to start an SMS business in Nigeria and make fortunes?
Industry expert reveals everything you need to get started…… the right way

One of the most lucrative online businesses you can do in Nigeria today is the Bulk SMS business. With a little work on your part, you will realize that the sheer numbers of people who will require your services are many. This is because more and more SMS messages are sent as days pass by and in about a year, some SMS website owners have grown from about 20,000 monthly SMS volume to over 8 million monthly SMS volume. When you sell at N5 per SMS unit, you make an income of N10,000 to N1Million per month.

As easy as it may sound making money from the business, your success depends on a lot of factors which may be out of your control especially if you don’t know how to develop the application and manage a website of such technical complexity. The real cost of developing an application and managing a payment gateway for SMS website is huge and is not affordable if you are a small business owner.

You can get the important things you need to know at: http://lekeojikutu.com/my-blog/113-things-to-note-before-starting-bulk-sms-business

Bulk SMS is a good idea. Most people who didnt get it right will discourage you. You should choose who you listen to.
Did you do your due diligence before reaching a conclusion on bulk sms?

I put a couple of things you need to consider before going into Bulk SMS on the link below:
http://lekeojikutu.com/my-blog/113-things-to-note-before-starting-bulk-sms-business

Decide where you wanna buy from and how you want to start after reading the points listed on that page.

Do you want to start an SMS business in Nigeria and make fortunes?
Industry expert reveals everything you need to get started…… the right way

One of the most lucrative online businesses you can do in Nigeria today is the Bulk SMS business. With a little work on your part, you will realize that the sheer numbers of people who will require your services are many. This is because more and more SMS messages are sent as days pass by and in about a year, some SMS website owners have grown from about 20,000 monthly SMS volume to over 8 million monthly SMS volume. When you sell at N5 per SMS unit, you make an income of N10,000 to N1Million per month.

As easy as it may sound making money from the business, your success depends on a lot of factors which may be out of your control especially if you don’t know how to develop the application and manage a website of such technical complexity. The real cost of developing an application and managing a payment gateway for SMS website is huge and is not affordable if you are a small business owner.

You can get the important things you need to know at: http://lekeojikutu.com/my-blog/113-things-to-note-before-starting-bulk-sms-business

For your passwords, you can generate secure passwords easily with:
http://www.onlinepasswordgenerator.com/password.php
OR
http://www.onlinepasswordgenerator.net

webdezzi: i believe more sales will come in for the merchant if you specify their website name instead of signup name on payment page.

i saw "christopher okwuokei" on payment page and it left me wondering, Is that supposed to be my own name or the company am buying sms from?

also clicking on how it work, and other link cleared up all transaction data.
besides, this is a good job, am telling people about this already.

If what you saw is a personal name, it probably means the person is using a personal account and not a verified business account.
It also notified you that "VoguePay securely processes payment for that name" so i don't think you should have confused it with your own name.
Thanks. Other observations noted.

The merchant site was designed to work that way. Why blame it on VoguePay?
The SMS site was designed such that you only click one Button before you are taken to VoguePay.

The ideal thing to do would have been to report this to the site owner if you suspect a glitch on his site rather than come here and blame it on VoguePay.

Clarification:
On the SMS site, you enter the quantity of sms you want to buy and click the order button, then it takes you to the next page where the transaction is recorded in the database and generates a javascript that redirects you to VoguePay for payment. That's how it was designed to work. Its not a glitch. And even if it were to be a glitch, its would be a glitch on an sms site and not on VoguePay. This has nothing to do with VoguePay.

When we approached interswitch for Aggregator license, they said it was technically impossible to give us the license. We spent about 3 months on that issue. GTB agreed to push the license for us so we went through GTB.

The transaction failed messages that occur once in a while is from Interswitch and partner banks. Anytime there is a complaint, we contact Interswitch directly. There has been no time that the issue was blamed on GTPay. I have stated on this forum before that we've held meetings with Interswitch on this issue and they didn't blame it on GTPay. The situation is not VoguePay specific but it became an issue on VoguePay because of the high volume of transactions VoguePay processes.

We have completed our direct integration with Interswitch but we are waiting for approval. Even when we finally integrate directly, it does not solve the switching problem. The problem has to be solved by Interswitch and partner banks. Not us or GTPay.

Your graph already indicate they have problem.........WHAT IS "PENDING?"

Pending is when your client initiates a payment but does not enter his card details.
Failed is when your client completes a transaction but Interswitch says the transaction did not succeed.
Approved is when your client completes a transaction and Interswitch says it is successful.

Please, stop pasting VoguePay's password protected contents on a public forum. That chart is only accessible to the appropriate VoguePay account owner but it is not the account owner's property and pasting it on a public forum violates VoguePay's Terms and conditions.

The issue we had over the weekend had been resolved since Monday morning and is not related to transaction errors that occur before or after then. We do not believe there is a cause to disable GTPay now as it is working fine.
We held a meeting with Interswitch recently on the issue of billing clients while saying transaction failed and they made us realize that this also happens with ATM machines and we can only report such or ask the client to report. We were made to understand that the fault is from the bank servers.

I paid for airline ticket online recently and got the same issue. This is an issue with the switching system/Banking system not VoguePay or GTPay.
Nigeria is still trying to get the cashless thing right and i must say that it is not yet perfect. If this error was from VoguePay or GTPay, it would not have dragged this long because Interswitch is very strict with their licenses and would have warned us to make adjustments or revoke our license.

My opinion is that this is an issue with the bank servers. They probably report unsuccessful debit to interswitch API and go ahead to debit the client accounts afterwards. Once interswitch gets the wrong message on a transaction, they would in-turn report a wrong message to our API and we display a wrong message to clients: TRANSACTION FAILED!

While this error only constitutes a very little fraction of all transactions that take place on VoguePay, we have not kept our fingers crossed. We have been seeking ways to prevent such from happening at all but there's little we can do. We cannot troubleshoot banking applications or switching applications for their owners.

You do not get this type of error with other cards or VoguePay-to-VoguePay Transactions.

The technical part of going directly has been concluded. We are waiting for approval.

We were not aware of the problem at first because Interswitch has connectivity issues with bank servers once in a while (e.g when your ATM card is debited and ATM machine does not dispense.). For those that reported early, the support team thought it was one of those problems. It was when the report became consistent that we had to start troubleshooting it.

Accept our sincere apologies.

We believe that the problem has been resolved now and you will be notified officially once we confirm that it is working flawlessly.

This is a problem with GTPay Portal. It affects only the cards processed through gtpay/Interswitch.
We have been communicating with GTPay and Interswitch and we hope it will be resolved tomorrow.

We have also triggered a notification to all VoguePay merchants which should be visible once they sign in. All failed transactions are being refunded to buyers' bank account or credited to merchant wallet upon manual confirmation of any payment till GTBank resolves this problem.

While VoguePay technical support works every day, Interswitch and GTPay technical support only responds on weekdays hence the delay in resolving it over the weekend.

Our support has been most responsive and all support tickets have been answered within minutes or at most, within hours. We have not left any merchant stranded on this issue and we will not leave any merchant stranded. We will ensure that no merchant will loose a penny even if we have to ask them to request a refund through their banks. Please submit a support ticket if you experience a broken transaction.

Please bear with us as we work with the Banks and Card Issuers to resolve this problem.

Make Dual Core and DHTML come declare their assets for here. Let the probes begin.

Me thinks yawa-tide should be earning in dollaaaaaaaars. Abi na Euro?

Recheck your link. http:///bm23zyg is a fake url.

pufectskin: How soon can it be done?

Make a ticket request first. A couple of questions may be asked before an answer can be given.

The response and contact process for customers and clients have already been taken care of by support department.
There are also other ways to reach me including www.facebook.com/ojikutu and my email addresses.
Continously ringing mobile phone is a big distraction for me when programming hence the need to remove my direct number from my personal site. A lot of people still have my phone number though. If you contact me and require my numbers, i will give it as necessary.

databoy247: yep, just got a mail notifying me of the changes...although didnt see any news regarding the 3k limit sha

We had a meeting with Interswitch on the 3k limit late last week. We are still working on lifting the limit. Its not entirely within our power but we will give it our best shot.

pufectskin: How easy is it to integrate Voguepay with Magento?

Ease of integration is one of our strong points. Submit a ticket with your request for Magento extension. If our developers are too engaged to develop it for you free of charge, we can outsource the development and bear the cost. Most of the extensions on VoguePay were developed based on merchant requests.

flexgee: I love this Guy! Since i started using voguepay, I 've been so impressed by your services. Leke, I look forward to your integrating VISA payments. Two thumbs up to voguepay!!!!

Thanks.

mrvictor: I like this!!!

Thanks

ActiveMan: Thank you for this and also i BEG please get an EVSSL. your SSL current look some how to me, because you are processing money here.

We will look into it. It has been noted.

ojochidem: That was a honest and bold response there. We eagerly awaiting the changes promised.

Most changes and more have been implemented. You should have received an email from VoguePay to that effect. We are doing more and will notify you as we progress.
You should also have noticed a serious change in the support system. We will be asking for feedback on the new support performance shortly.

miracle4: no it's still pr2 i think

Some pages still show pr 2 while some pr 3. Some are even unranked.

http://voguepay.com moved from PR 0 to PR 3

I had that belief too but i wanted hard evidence that's why i went ahead to measure both. Now i know better.
Although, the measurement cost quite a lot of money.

With proper analytics, we have detected that facebook ads do not work well on our projects.

Facebook count clicks for us and spend a good chunk of our monthly advert budget but our analytics show that these counted clicks do not translate to real visitors. On the other hand, Google ads work well and translate to more visitors and higher Alexa ranking. We are about to conclude that facebook ads are not effective for us.

My analysis is based on the same cost per click on both advert sites, the same monthly budget for both sites and almost the same advert content for a period of 3 months for www.voguepay.com . It may differ with your projects.

If you have been measuring the performance of both adverts on your site, please share your experience or your observations? It might save someone some yet-to-be-wasted advert money.

Thanks all for your opinions shared about Afrisoft and VOGUEPAY

Every successful organization grows on the strenght of feedbacks. The truly good ones are bold enough to accept corrections (when they are in error) and are also proud to flaunt their success. The same goes with VOGUEPAY

Many of you may not know that VoguePay is only 3 months old. Our first transaction was in May 14. But after that, we have helped businesses like yours process over 3,500 transactions worth N3 Million securely. We have over 2,000 users.

So getting back to some of the issues raised:

N3,000 TRANSACTION LIMIT ON INTERSWITCH

3k limit is imposed by interswitch on some forms of online businesses that they(Interswitch) categorized as high risk especially bulk sms (we still have not understood why they did not impose it equally on all aggregators) but we held a meeting with them on this issue earlier today. So expect changes soon.
However, there is no limit for other cards like VISA and etranzact .

VISA CARD INTEGRATION
Our team of developers are working hard on the VISA integration. Should be up very soon.

OUR SUPPORT

Did you say our Support was awful?
I think that is our achilles heel. We have no excuse. We are deeply sorry for those who have had bad experience in one form or another with our support team. I already said we do not have any excuse and I am not trying to justify the delayed support or the time it takes to clear local and international support queue. (Yes! we have clients all over the world)

Our phones are not always switched off, they are always very busy. Those who have visited our office can attest to this.

With our newly restructured support (and additional phone lines coming soon), we believe you will enjoy a better relationship with Afrisoft and her subsidiaries.

We have learnt a few things here and we are already putting it to good use. Thank you all.

Let me round up with two good news:

1. if you are interested in signong up as an affiliate, you will make LIFETIME INCOME from every account holder you refer to VoguePay

2. We are looking to review our policy for merchants. You can now collect your money two days after the transaction as against the 5 days.

Do you have opinions for us...? We will be glad to hear from you and we will publicly tell the world that you are a good Samaritan

At VoguePay......we simplify online Payment in Nigeria

Leke Ojikutu
C. E. O
Afrisoft Interactive Ventures Limited.

Shadowblaqq: @leke your products are always top notch, however i want to know if the sms portal creator works with joomla 2.5

Thanks man.
The SMS Portal Creator Works with all versions of joomla from 1.5. This includes 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5 .
You may check www.smsportalcreator.com for details.