How to accept online payments in Nigeria (2026 guide)

Accepting payments online used to mean weeks of paperwork and a developer on retainer. Today a Nigerian business can be live in an afternoon. This guide walks through exactly how.

What you need to start

You need three things: a business (even an unregistered one), an email address, and a website or link to send customers to. That's it — you can start collecting before you finish full verification.

Step 1 — Create your account

Sign up, create your business profile, and you'll be issued test and live API keys automatically. Save your secret keys somewhere safe; they're shown once.

Step 2 — Choose how customers pay

Most Nigerian businesses want two rails:

• Cards — customers pay with debit cards on a hosted checkout.
• Bank transfer — customers send money to a dedicated account number (NUBAN) in your business name.

You don't have to choose; support both and let the customer pick.

Step 3 — Initialize a payment

From your server, call the initialize endpoint with the customer's email and the amount (in kobo). You get back a checkout_url. Redirect the customer there.

Step 4 — Confirm the payment

Never mark an order paid from the browser. Instead, verify server-side — listen for the charge.success webhook (signed, reliable, retried) or call the verify endpoint. Only then do you fulfil the order.

Step 5 — Get your money

Card collections settle to your withdrawable balance at T+1. Bank-transfer inflows land instantly. Withdraw to your bank whenever you like.

Limits before verification

You can collect up to ₦500,000/month before completing KYB. Verify your business to remove the cap and unlock a dedicated business bank account.

That's the whole flow. The hardest part is deciding what to sell — the payments are the easy bit now.