Selling online in Uganda when your customers pay by mobile money
Card checkout is the wrong default here. What a Ugandan shop actually needs to sell beyond its own street.
Two things break most attempts to put a Ugandan shop online. The checkout asks for a card, and the delivery form asks for an address that does not exist. Both are inherited from platforms built somewhere else.
Payment is the whole funnel
If a customer cannot pay with MTN Mobile Money or Airtel Money, they will not pay. Mobile money is not an alternative method to add later; for most shops it is the method, and card is the exception. That has consequences beyond the payment button: the confirmation arrives as an SMS prompt on a phone, the amount is in shillings and whole numbers, and the reconciliation at the end of the day has to match a till that also took cash.
Addresses that match how people give directions
A delivery address in Kampala is a neighbourhood, a landmark and a phone number. A form that demands a street and a postal code produces either abandoned carts or fiction. Zones with their own delivery fees, plus a phone number the rider will actually call, works better than any address validator.
One catalogue, two counters
The mistake that costs the most is running the online shop as a separate business. If the website sells an item that walked off the shelf an hour ago, the customer finds out after paying. The catalogue, the stock and the prices should be the same record the counter uses, so an item sold in the shop disappears from the site.
Units that make sense
Retail here is not always priced per piece. Produce sells by the heap, the bunch and the basin, and a system that only understands units forces staff to lie to it. That is worth checking before you buy any till or shop software: ask how it prices a heap.
What to do first
- Get the stock accurate at the counter before putting anything online. An online shop built on a wrong stock count multiplies the error.
- Start with the fifty items that sell, not the whole catalogue.
- Set delivery zones and fees before launch, because arguing about delivery after an order is placed loses the customer.
- Decide who answers the phone. Online orders in Uganda still get confirmed by a call more often than not.
Promie runs the counter and the stock, and the E-Commerce Engine puts the same catalogue online with mobile money checkout. Book a demo if you want to see the two working together.