MPESA API For Shopify Payments.

M-Pesa is a mobile phone based money transfer system in Kenya which grew at a blistering pace following its inception in 2007.

Nearly a decade after its launch, M-Pesa has transformed economic interaction in Kenya. Its success reshaped Kenya’s banking and telecom sectors, extended financial inclusion for nearly 20 million Kenyans, and facilitated the creation of thousands of small businesses.

M-Pesa has undergone explosive growth: in 2013, a staggering 43 percent of Kenya’s GDP flowed through M-Pesa, with over 237 million person-to-person transactions. M-Pesa is nearly ubiquitous in the daily lives of Kenyans due to a range of services that include money deposit and withdrawal, remittance delivery, bill payment, and microcredit provision.

M-PESA enables you to go further, pushing the boundaries of its core service: mobile money transfer. It has been termed as the leading mobile money transfer service in Kenya and the world over. Kenyans Mainly shop Online using MPESA, a small number uses their credit or debit cards. Its for this reason, that MPESA launched their new M-PESA platform dubbed G2 (for M-PESA 2nd generation platform) which offers versatile integration capabilities that any development partners can take advantage of, to create excellent M-PESA journeys across the different industries they serve.

On the New platform, they have consolidated the different interfaces the developers have expressed interest in to enable innovation around M-PESA. As expected, most of these are about the payment journeys, covering both disbursements (Business to Customers – B2C) and service payments (Customer to Business – C2B and Business to Business – B2B). These and other features are now available via secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow for third party applications to easily plug into M-PESA.

On the other hand, Shopify is the worlds Leading online shop builder – it is currently powering over 325,000 online shops and has helped businesses process over $24 billion USD worth of sales.

If there could be an API integration for the 2 websites, this would mean so much to the small business holders in Kenya who are always constantly looking for a seamless platform on which they can create their online shops and sell their items.

I contacted Shopify seeking to see if there could be a solution to this, and this what they had to say.

"My name is Billy Jo and I’m a Guru here at Shopify. We had chatted earlier about the use of the MPESA payment gateway for the store. There is an option to have the payment gateway themselves contact us and see about implementing their already developer gateway on to our platform. You can reach out to them and let them know that you have already talked to us and that they must submit the request themselves and see if we'd be able to onboard them with us. They can let us know that they have you a customer who is looking to use this gateway, and also let us know if they've had other requests as well. Right now there's not a way for you to create a connection between this gateway and your Shopify shop directly. The api information, and developing your own custom gateway wouldn't include this".

The only reason I started this petition is just to emphasize on the point that I am not Alone, this is on behalf of all small business holders in Kenya who would wish to be using shopify as their selling platform and MPESA as their Payment Gateway.