When you enter a store to purchase an item, it’s very easy to go round the aisle, look for what you really love and head straight to the cashier to make your payment and check out.

The process is similar but different with online purchases. Trust is the most essential ingredient for convincing a user to shop online.

In the early days of Hingees, most of the sales were mainly made offline because people wanted to see what they were paying for. However as events developed, spreading the word and selling to multiple people necessitated the need for an online presence.

The easiest solution at the time was to register on a marketplace website. I chose Traclist simply because, its user interface and the shopping experience was seamless. There were only a few steps involved from adding an item to your shopping cart to check out. However, there was a challenge. At the time, Traclist’s policies didn’t allow merchants to connect directly with customers. This was a huge downside because it never allowed me to create the user experience I envisaged.

This fueled my decision to move to the Konga marketplace as it offered merchants the opportunity to connect directly with customers. Regardless of this, something was still missing. The website’s interface didn’t offer the kind of user experience I wanted.

I knew the only way out was to look for a way to sell directly to my customers and allow them a fantastic experience with a good interface.

Having worked in the e-commerce industry for some time, I understood a bit of how the process works. Interswitch was the most readily available option for online payments and it involved a lot of bureaucracy to get things rolling. I wasn’t ready for the stress.

I kept looking for answers and by chance, I spoke with a friend who knew Shola, the CEO of Paystack. Prior to that time, I never knew anything like that existed. I checked out the website and immediately fell in love with its fluid user interface. I had found my business the right home. Registration and integration only took few minutes. There was a demo portal to test how things would work on your website. It was so seamless and super cool to be Nigerian. lol

As I said earlier, trust is one big ingredient for shopping online and is often influenced by good design and ease of use. As a designer, I’ve learned that simple designs provide clarity. It is also quite effective at conveying the intended message. It’s ironic, but our world today is filled with things vying for our attention, that the simplest things end up standing out. Paystack’s payment gateway brought this home for me. It was a beautiful compliment to the simple design of the Hingees website.

The first major test was the 2016 Black Friday sales. We had zero complaints from customers for all transactions that day.

To this day, we’ve processed over half a million Naira in online transactions using Paystack with 95% success rate.

~ GoodMan