Choosing the right payment platform for your project

Sometimes, we might want users to make payments in our apps/websites for a variety of reasons. On the “techy” side, this means integrating a payment gateway. Choosing the right payment gateway is analogous to choosing a new haircut; you have to choose one that’s right for you.

Illustration:

Dorcas, a renowned programmer, loves to make popcorn so she decides to build a mobile app where people in her community can order her fresh popcorn. After building the main parts of the app, she begins to ruminate on how her customers would pay (on the app). Which payment gateway should she integrate? While considering different gateways, she asks these questions:
<ul><li>Would it be secure?</li><li>What if the gateway suddenly breaks/closes down?</li><li>What if someone tries to pay with a very weird/unsupported card?</li><li>Would anything change if I begin to scale beyond my small community?</li></ul>
My talk would focus on a detailed explanation of what a payment gateway is and what you should look out for when trying to choose one. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of choosing the right payment gateway for your project. After all, nobody smiles when money business goes wrong. It is important for developers to understand concepts like PCI-compliance and active support. These, and many more are going to be discussed thoroughly during my talk.

On the 16th of June, 2018, I gave a talk at Google I/O Extended in Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria titled: Building apps with Google-pay. In preparation for this talk, I created a GitHub repository that guides Android developers on how to integrate a number of popular payment platforms (Google pay, Paystack, etc) into their applications. I am currently working on making this repository generic so that it would be useful to all types of developers. As of this writing, there are about seven branches representing different payment platforms. The project also has a growing number of stars and feedbacks. I plan to share this repository during my talk and also seek contributions.