Payments 5 min read
Taking payments online in Ghana: a practical Paystack checklist
What to get right when you add Paystack card and mobile money payments to your website or app: webhooks, verification, receipts and reconciliation.
Paystack makes it straightforward to accept cards and mobile money in Ghana. The checkout is the easy part. What separates a dependable payment flow from a support headache is everything that happens after the customer taps pay. This is the checklist we follow.
Set the amount on the server
Never trust a price sent from the browser. Create the transaction on your server, from your own price list, and send the customer to Paystack with that reference. Store amounts as integers in pesewas.
Trust the webhook, not the redirect
Customers close tabs, lose signal and press back. The redirect after payment may never arrive. Paystack's webhook is the source of truth: verify its signature with your secret key, then confirm the transaction with the verify endpoint before granting access or marking an order paid.
Handle the same event twice
Webhooks can be delivered more than once. Record each transaction reference and ignore duplicates, so a retry never enrols a student twice or ships an order twice.
Issue a receipt automatically
Once a payment is verified, send a receipt by email and show it in the customer's account. It reduces 'did my payment go through?' messages to almost nothing.
Reconcile daily
A simple daily report comparing your records with Paystack's settlement catches the rare mismatch while it's still easy to fix.
- Server-side amount and reference
- Signed webhook, verified transaction
- Idempotent processing by reference
- Automatic receipt
- Daily reconciliation report
None of this is exotic, but each step closes a gap that payment flows added in a hurry tend to leave open. If you want online payments on your site or app, we can help you get it right first time.
