Payment options in South Africa

Resources & Tutorials
1

What payment integrations are available for South Africa?

2

Hi @Solo1

Here are the best South African payment gateways below:

Payfast – Best overall
Yoco – Best for card payments
Ozow – Best for Instant EFTs
Zapper – Best for QR codes payments
SnapScan
Mobicred
Payflex
Peach Payments
Paygate
PayGenius
Netcash
PayU
Paypal
2checkout
Stripe South Africa

3

Good day,

Thank you for your email. I’m fully aware of all of these paygates in South Africa but not aware that they can handle payments and be integrated with Adalo. What would this integration look like? Would it be a webhook, link or Zap from Zapier or N8N? How can I integrate Payfast into Adalo?

Thank you for your time. Kind regards
Solo

4

Kindly refer to the below link for the custom integration.

5

Typical Adalo one line answer! Support for new no-coder’s in Adalo is just shocking! I can not tel you how many support tickets of users Ive seen here that where, either closed after 10 days with no reply to their question or user receives a simple one liner answer that actually does not solve their problem all it does is shows activity from Adalo support as if questions are an annoyance.
Why is it that most of Youtube tutorial videos are 2-3 years old? Almost no content creators make any new Adalo tutorial videos and the ones that did make some content are now either with Bubble, Flutterflow or some other no-code platform? One can find full tutorials from start to finish, hours long for other no code builders but not for Adalo!
Where can new no-coders find full Adalo build tutorials? Tutorials by Adalo are very basic and does not help with complexity, logic needed to build a fully functional app.
Sending a new no-coder a one liner answer saying they should read a manual is like giving a learner driver the manual of a car and tell them to build their own car! Where do they start…?

I’m just ranting on here but I’m sure that there are many many new no-coders in the same boat. Adalo is losing out on many failed no-code projects and new no-coders leaving from a lack of support and tutorials.

6

Hi @Solo1,

To answer your question in brief: there are 2 options to integrate a payment system to Adalo. Option 1 is to build a custom component. Option 2 is to try implementing manual integration.
Usually Option 2 works like a “triangle”:

  • Adalo app opens a web page of a payment system, passing all the parameters to it;
  • payment web module processes the payment and returns the result (usually it is a callback URL with some params)
  • as it is quite complicated to get URL in Adalo dynamically, there is a 3rd party platform like Make or a cloud function in AWS/GCP/DigitalOcean/… which serves as a callback URL, gets response from the payment system, and puts this response to Adalo collections via API.
    Deeplinking component might help but I’m not sure if it will work or not. Also I don’t want to discuss the security aspects of such approach (separate analysis needed).

Also, some side thoughts. I understand your frustration about the lack of tutorials for your case. However, please let me clarify some things:

  • Adalo Forum is not an official support channel. Makers share their experience here and help each other with advices.
  • Community Leaders are not Adalo employees. They are volunteers who help other forum members.
  • If you would like to get an official support, here is the link: Submit a Support Ticket.
  • You can find quite a lot of tutorials in the Adalo App Academy https://appacademy.adalo.com/ (and of course on the help page https://help.adalo.com/). Some of the tutorials in the Academy are pretty long and complex.

Although, I can fully agree there are missing tutorials for cases like yours.

However: the case is quite specific (payment system in SA). In order to make a tutorial, someone has to (a) spend their time to investigate API of a specific payment system, (b) build the integration, (c) test it thoroughly - keep in mind it’s money-related, and then (d) make a comprehensive video explaining all the integration details. And this person needs to be a developer AND a coach-speaker. Such job may require several days (or more) to complete, depending on the integration complexity.
In a real world it’s quite rare that someone does this just for fun - usually people want to be compensated for their efforts.

I’ve seen some developers doing tutorials for local payment systems in some other countries. But usually they appeared as a result of a client project and someone needs to pay to access such a tutorial.
It may be frustrating but it is as it is.

Best,
Victor.

7

Thank you Victor for your reply, its much appreciated. :+1:t2:

Also my apologies I did not know that this is not an official Adalo support platform. So a thanks too all the members contributing and sharing knowledge.

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