PayFast Review

INTRODUCTION TO PAYFAST

PayFast is a leading online payment processing solution for individuals, NPOs, and businesses of all sizes. PayFast is a proudly South African company that is part of the DPO Group and caters to 80 000 merchants in the country. The company’s founders, Jonathan Smit and Andy Higgins had the vision to bring a simple and easy payment gateway to individuals, small businesses, start-ups, and charities.

The PayFast business model is based on the success of its merchants – PayFast only charges a small fee for every payment that is successfully processed, without any setup, monthly or hidden fees being payable.

PayFast provides some of the best tools and support systems to help any online business to grow while the customers of a business only pay a small transaction fee when they make a sale.

PayFast supports the most popular payment methods and joins in with more than 80 platforms and custom integrations.  After a person signed up for a free account with PayFast and has been verified, he can immediately start receiving payments instantly via his website or email. It is not required to have a merchant bank account because PayFast processes the funds in its bank accounts and then pays it out to the customer’s bank account upon request.

Whether merchants use an existing shopping cart system or run a custom-built website, PayFast offers full integration flexibility, making it one of the best go-to payment facilitators for businesses of any size. PayFast is perfect for any individual with a great idea for an online store, for small to medium businesses, for entrepreneurs looking for economic solutions for their current business, for street vendors, and for small entrepreneurs without online stores.

It is easy to get started with PayFast, as the process only requires a verified PayFast account that can be integrated with the merchant’s website.

Users do not need a merchant bank account to receive payments with PayFast. PayFast has aligned with some of the leading eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, WHMCS, and Magento so that merchants can easily integrate the secure payment gateway into their online stores’ checkout processes. As such, PayFast offers the broadest range of shopping cart combinations in Africa and has compiled comprehensive developer documentation to facilitate custom integration.

With a custom PayFast integration, merchants can start receiving payments instantly on their digital platform. The PayFast Developer Documentation includes everything users or their developer needs to know how to successfully integrate PayFast into their website. Users can manage everything related to their PayFast account through a dashboard, such as, viewing their account balance and recent transactions, generating reports, requesting payouts, and more.

HISTORY AND HEADQUARTERS OF PAYFAST

PayFast is a Cape Town-based company that was founded in 2007.

PayFast has become a trusted online payment solution for over 80, 000 merchants in South Africa, including businesses, causes, and individuals.

PayFast was founded by Jonathan Smit and Andy Higgins with the vision of helping online merchants like businesses, individuals, and causes to grow their businesses. More than a decade later, tens of thousands of merchants from a variety of big and small South African businesses have already registered with PayFast and trust the company to process and manage online payments made by their customers.

SERVICES AND FEATURES OF PAYFAST

PayFast offers solutions for all individuals, businesses, and causes. They can join once and have access to all of its market-leading features to accept secure online payments instantly. The following services and features are offered by PayFast.

Several popular payment methods

PayFast offers a variety of payment methods so that customers can pay a business easily and securely online. More payment options mean access to more online shoppers and increased sales.  PayFast South Africa comes with all different types of payment methods that will suit most businesses like credit cards like Visa, Mastercard, Instant EFT, and many more which will allow your store to make direct purchases online.

Subscriptions

The subscriptions feature is useful for businesses that run a membership or retainer style business model or product since it allows for automated, scheduled payments. Subscriptions are perfect if you are thinking about starting an online store with membership plans and or a retainer-style business. Everything is automated and scheduled as needed.

Tokenisation

With tokenization, it brings single-click style payments to a business.  You can start accepting recurring ‘once-off payments without the repeated need for authorization. Tokenisation is perfect for any business that needs a faster checkout process.

The way it works, your visitors store their card details with the PayFast secure payment system which keeps the details safe as a token and this will allow a visitor to your online store to buy products using a token and not having to supply their credit card details whenever they want to make a purchase. This is perfect if you have many returning clients.

Split Payments

You can split online payments with a third party. Instantly split a fixed amount, a percentage, or a combination of both when a payment is made. This is an excellent way of building a splendid passive income stream.

As a web developer, you build an e-commerce business for a client with great products but with no knowledge about an online store. You then agree to a payment split for running the online store for them and every time a visitor buys a product you will receive a commission in your PayFast account via the split feature.

Request a Payment

Individuals, businesses, and causes can all accept online payments, even if they do not have a website. They can just send an email containing a clickable link for their customers to pay them. This is perfect for anyone that hustles hard to make money without a website and it is easy to set up. You can send someone a mail with a “buy now” button and this creates an online payment process for the buyer.

PAYMENT METHODS ACCEPTED

PayFast supports the most popular payment methods including the following:

Credit and Cheque Cards

Visa, and Mastercard credit cards are the most popular and trusted online payment methods around the world and can be used with PayFast.

Instant EFT

Instant EFTs by PayFast allow online shoppers with access to internet banking to make an Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) that gets instantly verified.

Mobicred

Mobicred is an online account that gives buyers access to credit, which they can use to pay for a business online through PayFast.

Masterpass

Masterpass is a digital wallet from Mastercard that enables online shoppers to quickly and securely check out and make online payments.

SnapScan

SnapScan is one of South Africa’s first ‘scan to pay’ contactless payment apps that make it easy and safe to pay and receive payments online.

Debit Card

Debit cards issued by Maestro and Visa Electron are still popular among many South African shoppers.

SCode

SCode is a payment platform that allows shoppers to pay for their online purchases in-store at one of more than 6 000 retail outlets across South Africa.

SAFETY OF PAYFAST

PayFast is PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider Compliant. It is a PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider, which means it is secured on the highest level.

PayFast was developed with the same demands on security and performance as websites that are used for banking services and share trading. Client’s account login, personal details, and all money transactions are secured using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology with high-security 256-bit encryption.

A customer’s sensitive financial information like credit or debit card details are never sent to the people they pay, so they can send money without sending their financial information. This way nobody needs to worry about paying people they do not know.

PayFast makes use of 3D Secure to further enhance the security of credit card transactions. More details of the exact security measures PayFast has in place can be viewed on the security page on its website. All a business’ customers’ credit card payments are done in the PayFast secure environment.

Security and Fraud

PayFast is committed to keeping a business owner, his customers, and all sensitive information secure. They take the data security of their merchants and their buyers very seriously and have put a multitude of automated and manual checks in place to protect both buyers and sellers from fraudulent transactions.

Online retail has a fraud rate between 1 and 2% of all transactions but through effective controls, PayFast’s rate is currently below 0.1% and is still going down.

Secure servers

The PayFast website, payments page, and help site are hosted on secure servers, safeguarding against phishing attacks.

3D Secure

This extra layer of security is used for all online transactions using a credit card.

GEO IP Tracking

By monitoring where transactions originate from, PayFast can look for mismatches with the card’s issuing country.

BIN/IIN Validation

This validation checks the card-issuing bank locations and merchants can choose to enable or disable payments from certain countries.

Fraud Reviews

All suspicious transactions are manually reviewed by a PayFast support team.

Extended Validation SSL

PayFast uses Extended Validation SSL with 2048-bit encryption, the highest-level encryption available.

ASV Scans weekly

PayFast runs weekly network scans to look for new possible vulnerabilities and certifies quarterly.

Two-factor authentication

This extra layer of security is available to restrict access to a person’s PayFast account.

Validation checks

Payments and card details are automatically checked against large online databases of blacklisted details.

Web application firewall

PayFast utilizes WAF technologies to detect and stop malicious activity before it reaches its servers.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

The PayFast website has a Help Center where several topics are discussed:

• A guide to signing up, and setting up your PayFast account to start receiving payments is provided via 16 Articles in 3 Sections.
• A guide to its Split Payments, recurring billing, and more are discussed in 23 Articles in 4 Sections.
• The management and configuration of a PayFast account are discussed in 68 Articles in 6 Sections.
• A guide for buyers on payments, subscriptions, and orders can be found in 32 Articles in 8 Sections and an Integration guide to integrating with PayFast is discussed in 185 Articles in 3 Sections.

Other popular articles include:

• How do I register for 3D Secure?
• Suspicious emails and text messages (phishing scams)
• Can I receive payments in USD, EUR, GBP, etc.?
• Can I make a payment with Capitec?
• Verify an Individual Account
• Verify a Business Account
• How does 3D Secure work?
• How secure is it paying with Instant EFT by PayFast?
• Know our fees
• Collection and payout process

SUMMARY

PayFast is seen as the ultimate online payment solution because it offers fast and secure online payments from anywhere in the world, flexible payment solutions for any business, and secure and instant payment processing for South African businesses, whether they have websites or not.

PayFast makes it easy for any business to accept payments from both local and international buyers, it streamlines your invoice management with integrated account reconciliation and even can manage event registrations and online ticket sales without much effort. PayFast is dedicated to enabling the secure, easy, and instant transfer of money to online merchants to help them succeed and grow in the era of a digital economy.

FAQ

What features must be considered when evaluating a payment gateway for your needs?

• Security
• Easy integration
• Detailed reporting
• Good invoicing options
• Multiple payment options
• Fast processing speed

What is a payment service provider?

Payment service providers connect merchants, consumers, card brand networks, and financial institutions to deliver a simple payment experience for merchants and their customers by processing payments quickly and efficiently.

What is PayFast?

PayFast is an integral part of the DPO Group offering a fully managed payment service solution for businesses to accept payments online.

Is PayFast secure?

Yes, PayFast is PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider.

Your account login, personal details, and all money transactions are secured using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology with high-security 256-bit encryption and sensitive financial information (like credit/debit card details) is never sent to the people you pay.

Can PayFast Process Mobile Transactions?

Yes, the product is ideally suited to mobile app payments.

Can I use PayFast to process recurring transactions?

Yes, the products have been designed for recurring transactions.

Can I Accept International Payments?

PayFast cannot be used to send money to international recipients. It is used by South African companies to receive money from SA and international buyers.