Intergrating Payments to your SaaS from Cameroon shouldn’t be this much of a Hassle

In my last post about renaming Trivue to Tagviu, I mentioned having a rough time integrating international payments.
This was mainly due to my region / geolocation.

I tried several popular payment providers and Merchant of Records: Polar, Stripe, Dodo Payments, Lemon Squeezy, Paystack, Flutterwave, and a few others.

The problem was:
A good number of them do not support businesses in many African countries.

Some of the payment gateways that do support a handful of African countries, like Paystack and Flutterwave, also currently do not support Cameroon

So I started looking locally.

I looked for tools built by Cameroonians, or at least providers that allowed operating in the CEMAC region. Anything that could let me accept international card payments for a product built in Cameroon.

I came across a few that seemed like a solution;

But most were built primarily around local payments like MTN MoMo and Orange Money.
I even found several that advertised card payments, only for me to sign up and discover that card payments weren't actually available.

Honestly, the quality of some of these platforms was disappointing.
Poor UI, Poor typography, Broken form validations, Weird things happening in the network tab etc...

Man I'd leave some of these sites thinking: "I know we can do better"

And that got me wondering:
Why aren't we more represented when it comes to global payment infrastructure?

Out of pure fraustration I kept asking; Is it the economy? Regulations? The developers? The market? something far deeper ? Is it me? Is it you?

At one point I even thought about what it would take to build my own payment platform for Cameroonians, and then African businesses, for accepting international payments. What it'll take to intergrate with banks like UBA, and EcoBank...

I could, but tbh:
There is bound to be a LOT of legal & financial hurdles (which I probably do not have the resources for), and potentially very very slow adoption, and also;
Do I wish things were in place already ? Absolutely!

But is that a rabbit hole i'm willing to go into rn ? Absolutely f*ing not.

So, I'm still looking.

I haven't integrated payments into Tagviu yet, but I have a potential way forward.

One way or another, Tagviu and all my SaaS Ideas are getting payments

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