Paynow, the local digital payments platform that managed to integrate mobile money and card payments has seen gradual growth monthly on both transactions volumes and values. A 30% month-on-month growth has been realised in the current months.
Using first-time buyer to overall monthly transactions key metric as a gauge, Paynow has seen a consistent 60-80% proportion, indicating that there are several thousands of consumers who have not transacted on the platform previously who are making purchases now. According to Vusi Ndebele, the team lead at Paynow, this growth is mainly attributed to the increase in the services that merchants are offering.
There indeed has been a generally more intense adoption of online channels by businesses lately either because they see an opportunity to consolidated revenues by increasing sales, or they see the disruptive tendencies of online platforms and would like to ring fence their customers.
In turn, Paynow’s online prepaid voucher portal startup, Topup, has reached a 3,000 transactions-per-month mark after its launch a few months back.
As a strategy, Paynow is also planning to interface more with customer-facing businesses in Insurance, Transport, Media and Entertainment with a view to exposing the public to the convenience of online payments.
Paynow also intends, within the coming few months, to introduce additional payment channels to complement the current Visa, Mastercard, EcoCash, Telecash and Zimswitch.
image credit : Webdev
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12 comments
Nice One.
I dont think these figures are of any benefit because I have been monitoring the Paynowreference Increments. The Count is now on around 46,000 since its inception and this doesnt not reflect the successful payments only but all attempts and testing. If we are being optimistic using 3000 as the maximum per month, then taking around $0.20 as their profit per transaction then these guys are only making around $600 per month at most. We will need to remove their monthly bank charges and salary for manning the platform.
In other words we are still miles backward to sustain eCommerce in Zimbabwe.
Ukada kuita billionaire after 1year in business then haufi wakaita business shasha. Mbichana mbichana, zvinofaya longterm!
If you take your 600 per month (which I think is too low cos they said they do 3000 topup alone a month and probably making more than 0.20c per tran) but lets take 600 anyway at compound 30% means that will grow to 250k a month after 2 years. Then this looks like a worth while endeavour. Lets see if they can maintain 30% growth for that long though.
Hazvina proof izvi.
At lest they started something. There was a story on Newsday some time back where they even said they are not making money yet from Paynow. https://www.newsday.co.zw/2015/07/13/zim-online-transactions-on-the-rise/
$500,000 is a span of money to handle for a startup in just a year. Who else can say that even smelt that sorta loot?
Anyway, respect to them if they can hang in there maybe they will be bought for a good price one day even if they aren’t making money – dot com style
Muchazvinyepera. 500k haiuye nemaJokes
Having conducted a successful local online purchase using PayNow, all I can say is they are EXPENSIVE. I was charged $6 for a purchase worth $179 transacted by Visa card and this is before my bank’s $1.50 transaction fee. It would have been much cheaper for me to simply make an online bank transfer and eliminate the exorbitant fees.
Nevertheless, they’ve shown that their product works, now they just need to work on their pricing structure (and hide it in the supplier’s price).
Yah, that seems steep. But it seems some sellers swallo the fees cos you buy something for $100 and when you choose how u wanna pay, all options (ecocash, visa…)are the same price. With other sellers, the price changes on each payment type cos they are making the customer pay the fees so they receive the full 100 bucks. I think these greedy sellers are also to blame because they don’t charge extra when you wanna pay by card in the shops so why do they do it on ecommerce!
For me the sticky issue lies on fees! Truly speaking, something must be done to this respect.
We watch from the sidelines at this stage. When your fees is reasonable enough we dive in…hang in there guys, it’s a universal struggle.
The fees are steep.