Most Ghanaian businesses already take online payments. A customer messages the Instagram page, the business replies with a MoMo number, the money arrives, the order ships. That works until the orders outgrow the person reconciling them by hand, or buyers start dropping off because paying means leaving your site to open another app.
Then you need a gateway, and the only question is which one. In June 2026, mobile money in Ghana moved GHS 492.9 billion across 954 million transactions, according to Bank of Ghana figures. Almost everyone who buys from you will reach for a wallet before a card, and every recommendation below follows from that.
For most Ghanaian businesses, the answer is Paystack. One rate of 1.95% on everything, GHS 1 flat to pay out to a mobile money wallet, published pricing, and next working day settlement. Pick something else only for a specific reason, and there are four of those below.
Budget roughly GHS 130 a month in fees on GHS 5,000 of sales, GHS 420 on GHS 20,000, and GHS 1,010 on GHS 50,000. Payout fees are separate from your rate and people forget them.
You may not need a gateway at all. Payment links cost nothing to set up and work over WhatsApp. GhQR is free and takes payment from any bank, wallet or fintech app in the scheme.
Which provider should you pick?
Find your situation in the first column. Most businesses are in the first row.
| If you are | Pick | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Selling in Ghana, or to Ghanaians abroad | Paystack | 1.95% on everything including international cards, published rates, cheapest payouts |
| A school, church, NGO or institution | expressPay | Runs Ghana.GOV, handles gh-link, the name a board will recognise |
| Selling to customers who use Ghanaian bank cards | theteller or expressPay | Only these handle gh-link, the domestic card scheme |
| Selling across several African countries | Flutterwave | Thirty-plus markets and multi-currency through one integration |
| Wanting payments bundled with SMS and USSD | Hubtel | Same 1.95% on mobile money, one vendor instead of three |
| A shop with a counter | GhQR | Free, and you can run it alongside anything above |
Why Paystack is the default
One rate across every channel, published where anyone can read it, and the widest developer support here. The inline checkout is clean, the dashboard is the easiest to hand to someone non-technical, and sandbox keys work from the moment you sign up.
Everyone compares the headline percentage, and on mobile money Paystack sits level with Hubtel. The gap you will feel is on the way out. Paying into a mobile money wallet costs GHS 1 flat on Paystack against 1.5% on Flutterwave, so a business sweeping GHS 20,000 a month into a wallet pays around GHS 12 a year rather than GHS 3,600. Take your payouts to a bank account and the two sit close together, at GHS 8 against GHS 10.
If any of your sales come from the diaspora, the international card rate settles it. Paystack charges 1.95% and puts cedis in your account, where Flutterwave charges 4.8%. On GHS 5,000 a month of card sales from abroad that gap is about GHS 1,700 a year.
Two limitations. Paystack does not handle gh-link, and it is not a merchant of record, so card disputes are yours to carry.
The four reasons to pick something else
If none of these describes your business, take Paystack and skip ahead.
- Your customers use Ghanaian bank cards. gh-link is the domestic card scheme switched by GhIPSS, and cards issued by Ghanaian banks often run on it. Neither Paystack nor Flutterwave handles it. theteller and expressPay do. This is the one genuine capability gap in the market, and it outranks any percentage point.
- You need institutional credibility. expressPay is a Visa Payment Technology Provider, PCI DSS certified, and the processor behind Ghana.GOV. If a board or a parent body will ask who else uses this, that answers it.
- You sell across Africa. Flutterwave covers more than thirty markets and a long list of currencies through one integration. If you sell into Nigeria or Kenya from Accra, the 4.8% international rate buys you reach you will actually use.
- You want fewer vendors. Hubtel bundles payments with SMS, USSD menus and a storefront. A review published in May 2026 recorded 1.95% on mobile money, plus 2.90% on Ghana-issued cards and settlement in one to three working days.
Can you skip a gateway entirely?
Two routes take real payments with no gateway and no build. Both are worth trying first. If you are still working out what kind of site you need, our guide on small business websites in Ghana covers the basics.
Payment links
Open a merchant account with Paystack or Flutterwave and take payments through a link, with no website involved. You create a link for a product or an amount in the dashboard and send it over WhatsApp or Instagram. The customer gets a proper payment page with your business name on it and pays by mobile money or card.
That solves most of what a checkout solves. Every payment carries a reference, so identical orders arrive labelled. Staff can be given dashboard access without being handed your wallet. Customers abroad can pay by card.
The limit is that a link is something you send. Someone browsing your site at midnight cannot generate one, so a catalogue with stock levels and delivery options needs a real checkout. Even then, run links for a few months and pick your provider on the volume you actually see.
GhQR, which is free
GhQR is Ghana’s universal QR standard, run by GhIPSS, owned by the Bank of Ghana. A customer scans your code with whatever banking or wallet app she already uses, or dials a USSD code if she is not on a smartphone, and the money lands instantly. One code accepts payment from any bank, wallet or fintech app in the scheme.
GhIPSS has stated there are no charges for payments made through the universal GhQR code. Generating a code costs nothing, against roughly US$500 for a POS terminal. Enrolment has climbed from about 65,000 merchants to close to 150,000.
You sign up through your bank, mobile money operator or a fintech rather than with GhIPSS directly. Bring your Ghana Card, plus business registration if you are registering as a company. It only works for someone looking at your code, so it complements a checkout.
The six signs you have outgrown manual
If none of these has happened yet, a gateway will add a fee and a dashboard and solve a problem you do not have.
- Two payments you cannot tell apart. Two customers send GHS 200 a minute apart, both from numbers you do not recognise because people pay from a sister’s phone.
- Reconciling at 11pm. An hour a day matching orders against a wallet statement.
- The customer abroad. Someone in London has the money and no way to send it.
- Your first assistant. To let her confirm orders you hand over the wallet your rent money sits in.
- No real books. Asked what the business earned last month, you can guess. That stops being enough the day you want a loan.
- Wallet limits. Mobile money wallets are capped by KYC tier under Bank of Ghana rules revised in March 2024. A minimum wallet tops out at GHS 3,000 a day and an enhanced one at GHS 25,000, with balance caps of GHS 5,000 and GHS 75,000, as reported when the limits took effect. Sell furniture or equipment and your customer may be unable to pay you that way at all.
One correction, because plenty of advice online still gets it wrong. The E-Levy is gone. Parliament repealed it and the President assented on 2 April 2025 under Act 1128.
What will it cost you a month?
A percentage is hard to feel until you put your own volume through it.
Worked examples
These assume all sales by mobile money and one payout to your bank each week. Round them up rather than down.
| Monthly sales | Paystack | Flutterwave |
|---|---|---|
| GHS 5,000 | About GHS 130 | About GHS 140 |
| GHS 20,000 | About GHS 420 | About GHS 440 |
| GHS 50,000 | About GHS 1,010 | About GHS 1,040 |
Selling to the diaspora changes the picture. On GHS 20,000 a month with GHS 5,000 of it on international cards, Paystack costs about GHS 390 in transaction fees and Flutterwave about GHS 540.
The published rates
Both providers publish these, so you can check them yourself.
| Paystack | Flutterwave | |
|---|---|---|
| Local transactions | 1.95% across all channels | 2.6% card, 2% mobile money and bank transfer |
| International cards | 1.95%, settled in cedis | 4.8% |
| Payout to mobile money | GHS 1 | 1.5% |
| Payout to bank | GHS 8 | GHS 10 |
| Settlement | Next working day | Next day |
| Setup or monthly fee | None | None |
Flutterwave’s figures come from their Ghana pricing page. Paystack’s come from their pricing page as it stood in November 2025, the most recent version we could verify directly. Confirm current numbers before you budget on them.
Four costs that are not on the pricing page
None of these appear in a comparison grid. All four turn up once the money is moving.
- Payout fees. Your rate is charged when the customer pays. A second fee is charged when you move money out. Sweeping your balance daily instead of weekly multiplies it.
- Currency conversion. Flutterwave treats any payment not in your local currency as international, for pricing and settlement. Paystack settles international cards in cedis. Either way you take the provider’s conversion rate, and the spread never appears as a line item.
- Chargebacks. When a customer disputes a card payment the money comes back out of your account. Paystack is not a merchant of record, so you carry the liability. Rare on mobile money, real on international cards.
- Refunds. Flutterwave states refunds take three to fifteen working days to reach a customer’s bank. Your customer will assume that delay is you, so put it on your refund page.
What makes a checkout convert here?
Three things decide whether the gateway you picked earns its fee.
Mobile money first, selected by default
The most common failure we see is a checkout designed for another market. One of the big providers still leads its own press kit with screens that put a card form first, price in naira, and offer payment options that mean nothing here.
A customer opens that, sees a field for a card number, and leaves. Mobile money belongs at the top, already selected, with card underneath for whoever needs it.
The OTP step, where first-time buyers give up
A mobile money payment finishes on the customer’s phone, not on your website. Paystack’s documentation calls the status pay_offline. For a first-time payer on MTN that means two confirmations: an OTP sent to her device, then her PIN. SMS delivery is not guaranteed, so the OTP arrives late or not at all, and the PIN prompt expires while she looks for her phone.
The fix is a line of copy. After about thirty seconds of waiting, tell her to dial *170# and approve from her pending list. It is the cheapest conversion work available here. Ask for it by name.
It only bites on first purchases. A returning customer whose number the provider already knows goes straight to the PIN.
Webhooks, and a fallback provider
A webhook is the provider telling your server directly that a payment succeeded, rather than your site guessing from whether the customer made it back to your page. Without one you get orders marked unpaid that were paid. Ask whether they are handled. The right answer is yes.
Then keep a second provider configured and dormant. Providers have outages, and if yours goes down on a Saturday you cannot sell at all.
What about everyone else in the market?
Around a dozen providers operate here, and comparison pages list them all with a tidy grid of percentages. We checked those grids against the providers themselves, and only Paystack and Flutterwave publish rates anyone can read. Everyone else puts pricing behind a login or quotes on request.
That cuts both ways. Any grid of ten Ghanaian gateways is mostly repeating figures that came from somewhere other than the provider. It also means unpublished rates are negotiable rates.
Negotiating needs a yardstick. PayAtlas, which tracks payment infrastructure by country, puts the Ghanaian market range at 1.5% to 3.5% per transaction, with around 2.5% typical and settlement in 24 to 72 hours. A quote of 3.5% on mobile money is one you can push back on.
| Provider | Rates we could find | Worth a look if |
|---|---|---|
| Paystack | 1.95% all channels, GHS 1 or GHS 8 payout | Default for most businesses |
| Flutterwave | 2% mobile money, 2.6% card, 4.8% international | You sell across Africa |
| Hubtel | 1.95% mobile money, 2.90% local card | You want SMS and USSD bundled in |
| expressPay | Quote on request | You need gh-link or institutional credibility |
| theteller (PaySwitch) | Negotiated by volume | You need gh-link, direct GhIPSS connection |
| DPO Pay | Quote on request | Travel, tourism, multi-country cards |
| Slydepay / Kowri | Quote on request | You want a locally owned provider |
| SeerBit | Quote on request | You already operate in Nigeria |
| Tingg (Cellulant) | Enterprise, sales-led | Serious cross-border volume |
| iPay | Quote on request | You need gh-link, but confirm it is onboarding |
Where that table says quote on request, treat any percentage you read elsewhere as a rumour until the provider puts it in an email to you. Ask for the mobile money, local card and international card rates separately, the payout fees, the settlement timing over weekends and holidays, whether your business type gets card access at all, and what volume earns a better rate.
Frequently asked questions
These come up on almost every project.
Can I take mobile money payments without registering a business?
Not through a payment provider. Every licensed one requires business registration and a TIN. You can keep receiving money to a personal wallet, which is what most businesses start with, but that is the manual route rather than an integrated checkout.
How long does approval take?
One to seven working days depending on the provider and how clean your documents are. Every major provider issues sandbox keys immediately, so a developer can build and test the checkout while paperwork is in the queue. Ask for that and it routinely saves a week.
How quickly does the money reach me?
With both Paystack and Flutterwave, the next working day. Payments taken on Monday settle Tuesday. Weekend sales wait, which is worth planning around if you pay suppliers on Mondays.
Do I need to accept cards at all?
Only if you sell to people who have them. For a business serving customers in Ghana, mobile money covers the overwhelming majority. Cards matter when you sell to the diaspora, when you sell above the wallet limits, or when your customers are companies.
Can I use PayPal to get paid in Ghana?
No. Ghana is not supported for receiving money into a PayPal account, and the workarounds using accounts registered in other countries breach PayPal’s terms and risk your balance being frozen. Take international cards through a local gateway instead, or use Payoneer or Wise if you are invoicing overseas clients rather than running a shop. Stripe does not onboard Ghanaian businesses either.
Can I charge customers monthly by mobile money?
Not automatically. A mobile money debit needs the customer to approve it on her phone each time, and Paystack states that recurring payments are not possible on its mobile money channel. Subscriptions in Ghana either run on cards or on a payment request you send every cycle.
Are there businesses providers will not accept?
Yes, and it is worth checking before a build rather than after. Paystack publishes its Ghana list. Cryptocurrency and forex trading are refused outright. A second group gets mobile money and USSD but no cards at all under Visa and Mastercard rules, including pawn shops, skill games, precious stone jewellery and adult content. Betting and pharmaceutical merchants sit in a review queue.
A customer says she paid and I have not received it. What now?
Check your provider dashboard before your wallet. Usually the payment succeeded with the provider while the confirmation back to your website failed, leaving the order looking unpaid to you and paid to her. Every dashboard lets you search by phone number or reference.
Mobile money volumes keep climbing and setting this up costs less than it used to. If you want a hand with it, see how we work or talk to us. If you are weighing up what an online store would cost, we have a full breakdown of ecommerce pricing in Ghana.
