Accepting mobile money on your website: the merchant's guide

In West Africa, mobile money has become the default means of payment. For a merchant, not accepting it online means giving up a large share of your customers. Here is how to collect payments properly, which choices to make, and the traps to avoid.

Why it is unavoidable

The figures speak for themselves. According to the BCEAO, WAEMU counted 248 million electronic money accounts at the end of 2024, up nearly 19% in a year. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the GSMA counts more than 1.1 billion mobile money accounts, two thirds of the world total. Your customer already pays this way every day.

The real challenge: too many operators

The problem is not accepting one operator, it is accepting them all. One customer is on MTN, another on Moov, a third on Wave, and some want to pay by card. Integrating each operator separately is expensive, multiplies dashboards and makes reconciliation painful.

The right approach is not to plug in ten operators one by one, but to go through a single integration that covers them all, with unified reconciliation.

How it works in practice

You integrate a payment API once. The customer picks their payment method, confirms on their phone, and you receive a confirmation. On the merchant side, everything lands in one place: payments, statuses, reconciliation.

• One integration instead of ten.
• One reconciliation , centralised, instead of one file per operator.
• Resilience : if one operator goes down, the others keep collecting.

The question of licensing

Issuing electronic money is strictly regulated by the BCEAO. A merchant does not improvise as an issuer: you rely on providers working with licensed institutions. It is transparent for you, and compliant.

Setting it up step by step

1. List the payment methods your customers use: operators, cards.
2. Choose an aggregation solution that covers them.
3. Integrate the API and test in a sandbox environment.
4. Go live and follow every payment in one place.

Collecting payments with UrbanPay

UrbanPay brings mobile money and cards behind a single integration, with unified reconciliation designed for merchants in the region. Discover it on the Servicespage. To understand the logic of unification, also read why unify your mobile money payments, and for the full picture, the ECOWAS / CEMAC mobile money landscape.