Start with how your customers actually pay
Picking a payment gateway in West Africa is not the same exercise as picking one in Europe or the US. Most of your buyers will not reach for a card first. They will open Wave, MTN MoMo, Orange Money, or another mobile wallet they already trust.
That means your first question should not be "which provider has the slickest dashboard?" It should be: does this platform support the payment methods my market uses, in XOF, with settlement and payouts that match how I run my business?
What to evaluate before you sign
Pricing: compare transaction fees, payout fees, and FX costs — not just the headline rate on a pricing page. In cost-sensitive markets like Côte d'Ivoire, hidden payout charges destroy unit economics faster than a slightly higher checkout fee.
Local payment coverage: confirm support for Wave, MTN MoMo, Orange Money, SPI, and card schemes relevant to UEMOA. If you sell across borders, check whether one integration covers multiple countries or whether you will stitch providers together yourself.
Mobile performance: your checkout must work on mid-range Android phones and unreliable connections. A gateway that looks fine on desktop but breaks on mobile loses sales you will never see in analytics.
Integration path: can your team go live with hosted checkout in an afternoon, or do you need months of custom work? Look for clear APIs, webhooks, official plugins for Shopify/WooCommerce/PrestaShop/Magento, and CLI tooling if engineers are in the loop.
Security and compliance: PCI DSS for cards, sensible fraud tooling, and a provider that understands UEMOA regulatory expectations — not a US-first platform treating Africa as an afterthought.
Operations: refunds, subscriptions, reporting, and payout visibility matter once you are past the first hundred transactions. Pilot with real money movement, not demo mode.
The landscape merchants compare us against
Francophone West Africa has no shortage of payment options. CinetPay remains a familiar name in Côte d'Ivoire. PayDunya is well known in Senegal. KKIAPAY is active in Benin and nearby markets. Paystack and Flutterwave dominate much of anglophone Africa. Stripe is expanding selectively. Pawapay focuses on telco wallet aggregation.
Each makes sense for certain merchants. Our point is not that everyone should switch tomorrow — it is that you should choose based on fit, not brand recognition alone.
Where lomi. fits
We built lomi. for francophone West African merchants from day one — not as a geographic expansion of a US or Nigeria-first product. That shows up in what we ship:
Native Wave, MTN MoMo, Orange Money, SPI, and card support through one checkout and one API.
Hosted checkout, payment links, subscriptions, customer portal, dashboard payouts, and official e-commerce plugins.
Developer tooling — REST API, SDKs, CLI, MCP server — plus an open-source core merchants and partners can inspect.
Transparent pricing without setup fees or monthly minimums.
If you need a closed, opaque stack and never plan to customize anything, a legacy provider may feel simpler. If you want local methods, modern developer experience, and the option to self-host or extend the platform, that is the problem we exist to solve.
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Whether you choose lomi. or another provider, run a real pilot before committing. If you want help mapping payment methods to your stack — Shopify, custom app, SaaS billing, or in-person sales through our mobile app — reach us at hello@lomi.africa. We would rather help you make the right decision than rush you into the wrong one.