M-Pesa is a mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and micro-financing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone for Safaricom and Vodacom, the largest mobile network operators in Kenya and Tanzania. It has since expanded to Afghanistan, South Africa, India and Romania. M-Pesa allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money and pay for goods and services easily with a mobile device.
M-Pesa has been a game changer in the way people access financial services in Kenya. According to a report by the GSM Association, there are over 17 million M-Pesa users in Kenya, which is about 35% of the country’s adult population. This number continues to grow as more people are becoming aware of the benefits of using M-Pesa.
One of the main reasons why M-Pesa has been so successful is because it addresses a big problem that many people face in Kenya – access to banking services. Before M-Pesa, many Kenyans did not have bank accounts and thus had no way to save or access money easily. M-Pesa has changed this by giving people a way to store money on their phone and send or receive payments easily.
If you’re running a business in Kenya, it’s likely that you’ll need to start accepting M-Pesa payments from your customers at some point. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to do if you’re using WooCommerce – one of the most popular eCommerce platforms in the world. In this article, we’ll show you how to integrate M-Pesa with WooCommerce so you can start accepting payments from your customers.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that enables you to turn your WordPress website into an online store. It’s one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the web, powering over 30% of all online stores.
How to Integrate Mpesa with WooCommerce
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress site. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once you have installed and activated WooCommerce, you need to get the PesaPal plugin. You can download it for free from the WordPress plugin repository.
Install PesaPal by uploading the ZIP file through your WordPress admin panel or by extracting it into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.Once installed, activate PesaPal from your Plugins page. After activating PesaPal, click on its Settings link to configure it.
The first thing you need to do is enter your PesaPal Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. You can get these by logging into your PesaPal account and going to My Account -> APIs -> Manage My Apps.
If you don’t have a PesaPal account yet, you can sign up for one here.Once you have entered your Consumer Key and Secret, scroll down and click on the Save Changes button.
Next, you need to select whether you want to use PesaPal Sandbox or Live mode. If you’re just testing things out, we recommend using Sandbox mode.
Once you have made your selection, click on Save Changes again. That’s it! You have successfully integrated Mpesa with WooCommerce.
Conclusion
In this article, we showed you how easy it is to integrate Mpesa with WooCommerce so that you can start accepting payments from your customers.
Do you have any questions about how to integrate Mpesa with WooCommerce? Let us know in the comments section below!
